Why do you contact me to link to your site

a waste of time for what?

[JohnRoy]

I've bolded some of the text [and inserted some sidelines].

Greetings;
My name is [stupidio], and I'm in charge of getting links for my website. I have visited your site and I think a link exchange could benefit us both because they have a related subject. [The only relation I've seen is that both have a .net in the URL.]

I'm offering you the following: If you place a link on the homepage of your site [tuna-widgets.net], I'll place a link to your website in my site.
And these are the websites where I would place a link to your site:

pharmacy-widgets.net

As you can see, this site have a decent PR [lie] and have a related subject [another lie], so if you are interested, reply to this mail.

Best regards

The email address was not collected by a robot. Someone took the time and effort to find it manually.
Why did they send this email?

[Lame_Wolf]

Sad to see what a bad name people like this is giving to Link Building...... One of the reasons why Link building is being frowned upon is because of these "template" link building mails. shocking... and sad

It is. I remember the days when I wanted a link, I would add theirs first. Wait for it to be cached, and for the page to have PR.

Then I would write to them, using the name that is mentioned on their site (rare to find a site that didn't have a name).

Nowadays, I don't even bother looking for sites to link with. I do receive plenty though. None are even remotely related (although they state that they are).

And to top it off, they tell me to add their link first, then they will add theirs (to a deep page, rarely cached, always no PR, along with other non-related sites).

Excuse me ? You've written to me for a link, but I have to add mine first ? Yeah right... delete.

[robdwoods]

I have to assume this is like any other volume spam technique. If the cost is low enough even a 0.001% conversion rate can provide a positive ROI. I'd never buy Viagra from an email, or send money to someone in Nigeria, but there must be enough who do to keep sending the emails. It's the same for this. Send enough emails and you'll hit someone who's been doing SEO for 3 days and doesn't know better yet.

[caran1]

Some webmasters do reply to these mails and add a link. It is better to buy a link on the website.

[piatkow]

It rather depends on who the link is from as far as I am concerned. Most I pass over but occasionaly it is a site that I would have linked anyway if I had known about it.

Requests from relevant sites within my subject area I don't mind. Off topic requests get junked. Bulk mailings hit the spam folder and stay there.

[almighty monkey]

You'd be surprised how many of my clients have phoned or emailed me asking if they should 'go for it' when receiving these emails.

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and there's plenty of people out there who know that 'Links are good!' without knowing much more than that.

We actually tried this a similar tactic for a client - we hired an indian company to do the inital contacting, had a couple of old high PR websites who's owners had gone bankrupt and we'd assumed ownership of to exchange links on with for backlinks to the client. So, bit more legit than the shady tactics above, but I suspect we could of cheated it and got a similar success rate.

$500 later, we'd got, like, 3 PR1-2 backlinks. Bah.

[JohnRoy]

3 backlinks for $500 ?!
Good (expensive) lesson.

[Lorel]

Also notice this is likely Triangular linking -- If you link to my site I'll link to your site from one of these other sites.

[jeyKay]

its a shame there are no genuine, quality networking sites where hard working site owners can find other quality link partners to link with.

[Crush]

who cares John Roy. Not like he stole anything from you, just move on, sometimes link exchange mails can work out.

[Planet13]

its a shame there are no genuine, quality networking sites where hard working site owners can find other quality link partners to link with.

I would just find them through google and propose a straight reciprocal link with them. You will get more value if they are NOT in a network, because then they will only be linking to you instead of you AND all your competitors.