I make efforts to get relevant and established sites to link to me, and I approach some that I think my visitors may be interested in.

Why then do I receive so many pointless mass emails asking imaker to link to them in return for a very poor reciprocal link. Always on the look-out for something interesting, unusual and / or the worthwhile amongst the rubbish, I do look through them, even though the majority are rubbish.

So, what do I class as rubbish?

• Three ways with no relevancy.
• Links where the site is about 5 minutes old (or less).
• Mass mailed and have been picked up as spam.
• Links from sites I have linked to before only to see their link back vanish shortly after (oh yes I do keep a record).
• Any site that is either banned or not indexed.
• Link pages that have no link from the home page.
• Spelling errors that really should have been picked up.
• Anything from gmail, hotmail. yahoo etc etc.

Having said that I suppose at risk of another flood of link request emails I had better say what makes me give a link.

• email is from the site requesting the link
• a personal (not mass) message
• the site is relevant to my site
• my users may be interested
• the requesting site has some history
• listed in search engines
• the link has value to my site
• it’s written in such a way it’s hard to refuse
• a relevant site asking for a reciprocal link on a page with a higher pr than mine!
• all of the above