What are these people up to?

[plasma800]

I keep getting emails from sites that want me to link to some website, yet their reciprocal link is from a totally different and off the wall domian?

What kinda scam is this? Or maybe its not

[martinibuster]

It's called triangular linking. They're trying to appear as if they have one way inbounds and not engaging in reciprocal linking.

[plasma800]

scam huh?

[hu12]

no scam

[larryhatch]

Well, scam is a loaded term. Its not white-hat if that's what you mean.

I would avoid T-L entirely. Google may well see telltale signs and derate sites accordingly. \
One giveaway is unrelated sites, especially grey-basket stuff like meds and gambling.
I avoid those anyway, with or without T-L schemes. - Larry

[plasma800]

agreed

[anallawalla]

How much computing power would be needed for a SE to look at site A then look at Site B to which it links, then look at all of site A's backlinks to see if Site B has links to any of them? It doesn't make sense even if there were a million servers devoted entirely to such a task.

So I might have a link to some popular directory, or blog, where there are links to numerous sites some of which might have a link to me. I'd hardly expect all three sites to get a penalty.

During a hand-edit, anything is possible.

[Quadrille]

It's not a scam, it's link spam (significant difference). The email spammer wants a link rigged in such a way as to deceive the search engines.

It used to work, but it's very 2005 - Google has can spot complex linking schemes at 3000 miles. Indeed, many 'exchanges' set up to exploit the unwary are experiencing severe ranking problems. Or rather, their members are.

The email spam contains another neat twist; almost invariably, you are asked to link to a site the spammer is SEOing; the link offered to you comes from a dead end page of a dead end site that never got better than 497, 822 in a Google serp.

To that extent, it is a scam, as you are not offered a fair exchange.