Link Building the Big Corporation way

Have you ever wondered how national companies get so many links to their sites and how they rank higher than local companies? It basically boils down to budgets and ‘securing links’ (note I didn’t say ‘buying links’) on high ranking, relevant, customised content rich pages. The way they do that is quite interesting and as the email below demonstrates they approach existing highly ranked sites in a sector they feel is related to their page they want to link to. In the email below they have approached a cleaning company with the view that they would create a unique, customised, relevant article on one of the page that talks about accidents on furniture / carpets that would link to their home insurance pages. The website owner gets a page more content and the national company gets a very relevant and valuable link.
I would advice against taking a site up on this offer and if you get an offer like this maybe add some more text / pages on your site related to the suggestion yourself but without the link to another companies website, obviously. Here is the email received:
My name is [company employee Web Editor] and I`m contacting you on behalf of [major car insurance company], one of the UK`s leading insurance comparison sites.
We are looking for good quality websites to partner with and having looked at your website, [one of our website’s url]  we’d like the opportunity to work with you to raise awareness of our home insurance comparison service. We are in fact currently working in association with a number of other cleaning and household hints websites to provide their users with useful tips and strategies to get the right buildings and contents insurance for their needs, highlighting issues such as pet damage and accidental damage cover for example.
How this works is that we agree a subject that is interesting to your users and relevant to the theme of your website. Our editorial team then hand writes a unique 600 word article for publication on your site, which enables you to add quality content to your website at no cost. In return it allows us to associate helpful, informative content with our brand, whilst raising awareness of our comparison service.
Far from being ‘salesy’ any promotion of our product is reserved for the final paragraph of the article – in most cases we do not even reference our brand within the article copy, instead giving websites the option to place our logo on their page alongside a ‘We’re working in association with [major insurance company]’ statement.
A few examples of articles we’ve written for other similar sites include:
– Is your home sparkling clean?
– Furniture care tips
– Handy household hints
If you’d like to get involved, or have any questions, please just reply to this email and I’ll be in touch again shortly.
Otherwise, if you feel that I shouldn’t have emailed you, I’m really sorry – please just reply with REMOVE in the subject line.
Kind Regards