After my rant the other day, I come into work this morning with a typical example of the appaling link exchange requests I get. Have a read, company name and that xxx out of course.

XXXXXXXX
UK Training Index

FAO: Sir/Madam,

As you may be aware we maintain the UK Training Index located at www. xxxxxxxx .co.uk .  This is a large online database of public scheduled soft skills, IT and other specialised training courses all of which have fixed start dates. The Training Index is now a well-publicised and successful website which receives more than 1000 visitors searching for courses every day.

We are interested in exchanging website links with established in-house Training Organisations and Training material suppliers. A reciprocal link arrangement will benefit both of us by increasing our visibility on the internet.

If you are interested in making such an exchange please email me giving:
Your website address, your website title and a brief site description.

If you have any other ideas for cross-promotion, do drop me an email. Please note there is no charge for accepting a link exchange from us.

Alternatively, if this email hasn’t reached the right person, I’d be very grateful if you could reply with the email address of the best person to deal with this request.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards

xxxxxxx xxxxxxx
Director
xxxxxxxx Ltd.
Tel: xxxxxxxxx

P.S. This is a simple link request from Xxxxxxxx and not from some web agency. If for any reason you don’t want us to contact you again, email me with the words “NOT FOR ME” as the subject of your message.

Link Entry for Xxxxxxxx:
If you would like to exchange links with us, please find below our details to post as a link on your site:

Title: Xxxxxxxx - The UK Training Index
URL: http://www. xxxxxxxx .co.uk
Description: Lots of X’s

Now, bearing in mind, the company I work for is an Educational Software Reseller, only, do you think the person sending this email has researched our site particularly well?

In the request they say they want to exchange links with “established in-house Training Organisations and Training material suppliers”. Now we are on the very edges of that. They are on about training for professionals from various industries, we mostly sell educational software to schools. Vaguely relevant at best.

They’ve sent an email to a generic mailbox, which, if it was actually found on the website, is listed next to a webmaster email address which they decide not to use.

If any research into the site had been done, they would spot a decided lack of link exchanges. The only people we link to, are those we actually work with, where we can link to additional information not found on our web site. Hardly the kind of site into swapping links purely for PR purposes. Considering the fact they have specified the full details for the link to them, they are obviously only in it for the PR.

How is that participating in the social network? That’s just spamming a few people you’ve never had a working relationship with, and expecting them to link to you. With the full intention to never have any working relationship with them again.

Once again, that is not participating.

To quote the cluetrain, markets are conversations.
If you’re trying to fake it, you’re doing something wrong. Trying to exchange links with companies in the vain hope of faking the fact there is some relationship between the two is missing it.

But I guess it ‘works’ and makes ‘good business sense’, so no ones going to take much notice.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2005 at 9:16 am and is filed under Internet, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.