I received an email to the webmaster account of one of the web sites I manage. The author suggested either exchanging links or providing me articles "on any topic" with links back to his site. Sadly for the nice looking young link exchanger (the email included his personal photo (!)), the message was immediately dumped in the trash. What was the problem? 1) The exchange requester didn't identify his web site. The message said it has "excellent Google rankings", but nothing beyond that. Is it porn? a software sales site? his personal vacation photos? something else? Who knows. 2) The exchange requester clearly hadn't even looked at the website. How do I know this? Simple. The site is for a rock band. It has music, photos, a calendar of upcoming gigs - but no articles. The only off-site links are to the band's Myspace profile and to related web sites (venues, local entertainment calendar, other bands they are friendly with, etc.). Even if I were looking for articles, it is unlikely that someone in Eastern Europe (based on his email address and name) would be in the position to write well about the band's local (American) indy rock scene. I'm happy to exchange links with others, but only with sites that are related to mine. Any request for a link exchange that doesn't even include the link to be exchanged goes into the trash without a second look.
Yeah, I get those all the time. Then at the end of them half the time they say 'If you do not want to receive future mailings click here." Yeah..... When I send legit partnership requests to companies, the last thing I am going to put in the email is an anti-spam policy.. That classifies the email as spam automatically. If I take time to research a site and then contact the owner with a valid proposal, I highly doubt they will consider my email spam. Most people just don't get that though.
Any emails like this I generally discard. The thing I keep in mind is generally nobody whom you don't know on the internet is going to offer you something to benefit yourself more than which is going to benefit them. Call me cynical but I just believe anybody who has to email me to request a link exchange when I've not actually expressed I wish to do a link exchange on my website, and then offers next to no details as in your case Nonny, they're up to something.
I agree. It just struck me as particularly odd that this guy enclosed his portrait, as if he was trying to make it "personal".
If someone put a photo in an e-mail asking for a link exchange I think I would be more freaked out than anything! And forgetting his URL - That is a proper 'school-boy error'!
It was spam...you were in a list of xxxx number of recepients. The longer you do this, the more of those you'll get.