How to respond to emails wanting to buy a link in your site

[silverbytes]

Time to time I get emails saying somebody want to buy a text link in my home for 1 to 6 months and asking for price.
How do you respond that king of emails

1) I'm afraid to sell links and spoil my reputation if that doesn't like SE (is that risky?)

2) How to set the right price if you decide to sell? PR 4 or PR 5 home.

[Receptional Andy]

The vast majority of those that I see are automated. The ones that don't get spam filtered get deleted ;)

[silverbytes]

It doesn't look like automated to me. But so what if proposal is real?

Or, let's asume they are personalized.

[bobncsu325]

Selling links here and there won't hurt your link reputation in my opinion, if you're selling it on a large scale basis like textlinkbrokers.com or textlinkads.com, you'll eventually get hurt, as long as the link appears natural, you'll be fine

Well I don't really care to use PR to help determine the link value, I use age, backlinks, and traffic to determine value. If you feel that your homepage can pass a lot of link value, then price accordingly.
A 6 year old site, with valuable backlinks from .edu, .org, .gov sites, and plenty of traffic, I'd charge in the neighborhood of $80 - $150 month, you don't want to overcharge, otherwise link builders will move on. Link builders know the true value of sites and would rather just look for another one if the price is too high.

[minnapple]

Have them write an lengthy article that fits your site's theme and charge them a years worth of promotional advertising.

[silverbytes]

They want text link in home, not article...

[stuartc1]

If the link is related and you are not worried about their competition, then why not make some money? You may be best to only sell by the month and not for a price which is not worth your time and effort. You should check the link URL for cloaking or spam. Any doubts, then say no or ignore. Some outgoing links to related sites do no real harm in my opinion, and if you gain some money, great!

[vincevincevince]

They want text link in home, not article...

Then they are fools. Perhaps you should tell their client (the owner of the site to whom they wish you to link) just how useless they are.