koan - 10:31 am on Jul 16, 2009 (gmt 0)

I've been turning down link exchange requests for year. Have I missed the boat on this one?

There are spammy link exchange requests and there are genuine link exchange requests. Don't fall for the spammy ones. You can spot them with their cookie cutter message.

"Dear sir, I like your site widget.com, I thought it was really informative. I think your visitors would also benefit from a reciprocal link exchange with my site on forex trading, xyz.com. As you know, links can help improve your traffic with search engines... blah blah blah... we will put your link once you have put ours."

They just sent millions of these by email or hired some SEO farm in India to do the manual work via contact pages.

Genuine ones sound like real people, they will be able to talk about your particular topic, share your interest, mention specifically why they like your site, show where they put a link and humbly request a link to their site also, which actually happens to be decent, on topic and beneficial to your visitors.

I automatically delete the first type, I check the second type when I have time, and maybe one out of 20 really deserve a link back. It's still a numbers game and a lot of work.