Forum Moderators: martinibuster
A very time consuming matter is looking for the best e-mail address to write to when asking for a link. I found many websites showing who was responsible for marketing, sales... Knowing that gives a choice who to write to.
Does anybody have any experience with tools to crawl a website for e-mail adresses? Tools like Arelis might be finding an e-mail address if it is on the link page or the homepage but usually the e-mail adresses are in "contact us" or "about us". Wouldn't it be handy to have a tool to give a list of all e-mail addresses found on a site with remarks on where those e-mail addresses were found (in order to check which e-mail address is the best to write to).
Or is there a search engine that allows you to look for e-mail adresses within a site?
My advice is to do it manually....I know it takes time but it is worth it in the long run. I have used tools in the past and recieved lots of abuse back and even my isp should me down once.
Now we do it manually, we contact lots of people at once and now recieve very very very few bad replies. The bad ones we can reply to and then turn it round and explain it was not spam.
Dougs
If you don't know what the site looks like in detail and haven't taken the time to evaluate the suitability of a reciprocal relationship you ain't getting one from me!
The benefit should be for the site's user, not for the site's owner. I get 6+ competitors per day asking for reciprocal links......how the heck do they think I will give them any attention? They are just another form of spammers who have mined the contact email addresses or guessed common names.
Good link partners are something to be treasured as they typically help with traffic, PR and anchor text. Bad link partners should be avoided like the plague.
I didn't mean to leave that out but I found that on some sites, if you look at hundreds of pages you find many different e-mail addresses.
An example:
- info@domain.com on the contact page
- webmaster@domain.com on the disclaimer
- marketing@domain.com on the product page
- name1@domain.com on the investors page
- name2@domain.com on the page for the press
- name3@domain.com and many more on the about us page
- namex@domain.com on a press release
...
But to look at each of the hundreds of pages to find e-mail addresses is very time consuming. So what I am looking for is a way to get a list of all pages with e-mail addresses of a certain domain (a list like the one above) so that I can look at each of those pages to decide which contact person is the most likeley to be responsible for linking to us.
Doug
Keep it very personalized or as mentioned somebody may complain and your site could be pulled off by your ISP.
Look for referrals as well as combination of keywords + link(s), etc to search for your potential link partners.
Note their link page (where you want a link), email, and name if possible. Using a combination of these three, you can send very customized mails without any fear :)
Good luck.
My own experience is that addresses like "sales" "service" "webmaster" "nameX" etc. are for very specific purposes in most cases. A "general" contact email tends to get read and forwarded to the right person - an out-of-context email tends to get deleted or forgot. Plus, if there's a form on the page, it's usually there for a purpose; to make it easier for the firm to direct contacts to the right people - use it in stead of an email address if it's the way this firm wants it, at least for initial contact.
I support all those in favour of the manual and individual approach. Please don't write to multiple addresses from the same firm, that can be considered spam, and please don't use one of the automated packages, even though they are smart and can send out follow-ups and such.
>> a way to get a list of all pages with e-mail addresses of a certain domain
Just by doing this you may get discredited some places.
/claus
After that, the "Contact Us" and similar pages are your most likely stops. Addresses on other pages are less likely to be productive.
I haven't found any rule of thumb for which kind of address works best. Every site seems to be different. At one, the webmaster may be able to set up link exchanges on his own; at others, the "webmaster" may be a designer who's no longer in the loop. Sales@domain.com may lead to a person who's very interested in web promotion at one firm, and to someone who still hasn't figured out what a link is at another firm.
One other piece of advice: resist the temptation to CC multiple contacts in the hope that you will get at least one good reply. Those different e-mails may all lead back to the same person, which will make your unexpected e-mail seem even spammier. Make a note of the other addresses, and contact a different one if you haven't heard anything from the first one in a week or so.
It works
