A link request

Does this sound fishy?

[ToyTalk]

I received via email today a request from a company claiming to be working on behalf of a major UK retailer. The email says that the retailer would be interested in buying a link to be placed on my website. The link would be to the toy section of their site (my site is a toy news site).

I am not a naturally suspicious person but I read a lot on this board about the dangers of links in relation to Google listings. The contact is apparently looking to boost their client's ranking by targeted links.

My question is, does this sound fishy to anybody? This is the first time I have been approached in this way and I have no experience to draw on.

I have been offered £135 per quarter. I am obviously not going to do anything without careful consideration (and hopefully feedback from here) and any advice will be greatly appreciated.

[martinibuster]

Did they directly state the link buy is for increasing their link popularity?

[KenB]

It might be legit, it costs you nothing but time to investigate what they propose. I started selling links directly on my site because people kept coming to me asking to buy links. Eventually I formalized the process and came up with standard ad locations and formats for ads I sell directly. It has been a great source of additional revenue.

[jakegotmail]

couple things to double check.

is the site that your going to link to relevant to yours and a "good" neighborhood?

and dont make it blatently obvious that your selling links on your site...

should be fine if those two things hold true.

[buckworks]

Do some scouting to check the backlinks they have already. Do they seem to be just grabbing any link they can get, or do you get a sense that their focus is to reach well-targeted eyes in relevant places?

[ToyTalk]

Thanks for the feedback.

The suggested site the link would be to is respected and relevant. The link would just look like an advert on my homepage (which in effect it would be, even though their main motivation is to get the link itself).

They did not directly state that the reason for buying the link was to increase their link popularity, to answer one question posed here.

I contacted the company in question and they seem fine - they have a nice website where they insist they don't get involved with any inadvisable link activity.

I think I'm going to give this whirl - I'll report back if anything untoward happens.

Thanks again for the advice.

[cabbagehead]

I don't see what the problem is.

Google apparently is now perusing the link buying hubs in order to indetify link purchasers and discount their links. So many are trying to accomplish the same but avoid the hubs. Moverover, many initial emails won't disclose the website in question out of concern for getting dinged for "spamming" people with link requests.

If you ask me - this is precisely how I would approach a link buying campaign for my site. In fact ... I'm going to be doing so soon .. so if there's somehting you didn't like specifically about their approach, please let me know! :)

[ToyTalk]

The only thing I didn't like about the initial approach was that it was badly written and full of spelling mistakes ('plain text' was written as 'plane text', for instance).

This simply made me suspicious, as there are so many scams out there at the moment, but I am also aware that some people just aren't good at writing.

My advice to you would be to make sure your initial approach is faultlessly written!

[Digimon]

That is very funny. As English is not my mother tongue I do make mistakes with my English sometimes. However if I am going to contact someone for business reasons, then I do spell check whatever I am writting. (common sense, isn't it?)

However I wonder if they have done that to show it is not an automated link request sent by a bot...
Oh well... who knows?