Any one who runs a website knows this email, you receive it or a variation of it 10 times a day and it goes something like this.

I have visited your site and it is a great fit with our and we would like to exchange links with you.

If you add our link to your site we will add your link to our site at oursite.com/links

As you might all ready know links from websites are a great way of getting better rankings in the search engines and you will get more visitors.

Signed the link building manager.

Is it worth your time linking to this site in return for a link back?

In most cases no.

Here is why

• The alarm bells ring for me immediately, they have not bothered to visit your site, you can tell because they do not say the name of the site, they also tell you nothing about your site, so this seems to me to be nothing more than an automated spam email. 

• The place they are offering to add your link to will just be a page of links 50 – 100 links on the same page, all unrelated to each other with short spammy descriptions, being amongst this list will do you next to no good at all, no person is ever lightly to see this list and read it and no search engine is likely to take note of it as useful. 

• Swapping links with other sites was a way of getting promoted in the search engines years ago but not now, he search engines have learned that these trading of links are designed to beat the system and so they down grade the value of them, proper link building from relevant related sites that are well maintained are always going to be better than this spam. 

• Finally if this was coming from a person who was running a proper link building campaign then they would have a name they used to sign the email and contact details.

Companies who use these link building techniques are often doing themselves more harm than good as the search engines will discount the links they have invested in building in this manor.

Next time you get this sort of email think about the above points, if you genuinely like the site link to it, but remember you will get very little Search Engine Optimisation credit back in return from the search engines.