Link Building is a valuable practise in any SEO (Website Optimisation) Project but we constantly get emails asking weather or not to take up an offer of a free link. In general there is no such thing as a ‘free link’ and the company offering it will expect a link back to another website. We generally instruct clients to ignore the link requests as it potentially breaks Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and could harm your site, here is an example email received and forwarded to us from a client this week:
We are SEO experts and I personally am the webmaster of our companies website. We have selection of websites well maintained that can be suitable to delicious-webdesign.com in SEO terms; topic, page rank, content and more. We have few web-solution suggestions for you and I would like to tell you more about them. If you are interested, I’ll be more than happy to send you the additional information and elaborate how I can assist your site achieve higher rankings & traffic.
As a liaison for a variety of clients, we are in constant pursuit of quality websites to partner with us for mutual growth, as I’m sure you are, too. Your site has compelling content, and I look forward to further exploring its pages. In the meantime, I would like to offer you a one-way link on our site, which is the most powerful link in Google’s point system. This opportunity will…
- Contribute to the number of in links your site has
- Increase your site’s visibility to the search engine crawlers
- Increase your site’s visibility to people using search engines
and, in turn…
- Help move your site up in the search rankings.
- Drive traffic and/or sales to your site.
- We will place your link at [page reference given that is a page of hundreds of links !]
That said, we would love for you to check out our client site and provide a one-way link back to it. We would greatly appreciate the gesture, as our client is growing and looking for increased traffic in a similar industry through one-way links.