I run a number of personal websites and I get link request e-mails on a fairly regular basis.  I’ve included a sample of an e-mail below that hit my e-mail box today.

There are very few fundamental mistakes in this e-mail, these guys will probably send out thousands of requests on a daily basis and don’t even check the websites they are requesting links from.

From:     ++++ +++++ [+++++++++@gmail.com]
To:      Webmaster
Subject:  Get Quality Home Page Link

Hello,

We visited your site http://www.++++++++++.com and are interested to swap links with your site.

We would add your link at the home page of http://giprimex.com/ which will actually help to increase the search engine rank of your site and give you some
targeted traffic too.

We’d appreciate a link back from the home/internal page of your site for
the mutual benefit.

If you are interested please reply to this email with your link details.

We look forward for your positive response.

Best regards,
++++ +++++

For starters my website does not relate to the subject, I usually don’t reply to any requests from a free e-mail account like Gmail or Hotmail etc. they say that the link will actually helped increase the search engine ranking and give me some traffic I really don’t think this will happen.

At the time of this post they have a page rank of 2, which is not a major problem as a page rank is overstated, as we’ll talk about in later posts.  I don’t do much reciprocal linking (I do some) reciprocal linking to a site that is not related in any way simply does not work in 2008.