… say that you aren’t a Spammer, doesn’t mean you aren’t.

I don’t like to post full emails that I get, but this one is a must. Check out what I got today…

From: cellphone@win-sports-bet.com [mailto:cellphone@win-sports-bet.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2007 3:27 AM
To: info@webmarketingnow.com
Subject: Link Exchange – Cell Phone Plans

NOTE: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind.We are sending this mail with sole intention of link exchange for mutual benefit.If you are not intersted in Link Exchange then you can reply simply “NO”, We will never contact you again.

Dear webmaster,

We recently came across your site through Google search and your active links page indicates that you are interested in link exchange. You have an excellent site and we would be delighted to exchange link with your site.

So Taking initiative in this direction we had already placed your link here:

We have placed the URL, Title, and a suitable description of your web site which will definitely benefit your online presence. Please feel free to verify this information and let us know if you want to change your linking information. We will be glad to assist with you right away!

We respectfully request that our web site’s link is hosted on your web site at the following location:
http://www.webmarketingnow.com/resource_partners.html

We appreciate it if you will use the following information to link back to us:

URL =
Title = Cell Phones
Description = Browse cell phones and cell phone plans for Sprint, Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, Alltel and more. Get free cell phones shipped to your door when you sign up for a new cellular plan with Cell-Phone-Plans.net

OR

You can also use our HTML coding to place our link at your site as below :

Cell Phones
Browse cell phones and cell phone plans for Sprint, Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, Alltel and more. Get free cell phones shipped to your door when you sign up for a new cellular plan with Cell-Phone-Plans.net

Once again, we look forward to become your link partner and appreciate it if you will send us the exact location of our link once you add it to your web site.

We look forward to your prompt response.

Many Thanks!

Campaign Manager

Okay, let’s look at all the things wrong with this link request.

1) First they come right out and say they don’t SPAM, when that is exactly what they did. Nice.
2) They tell me they recently came across my site, but they didn’t mention which site.
3) They said they liked my site. Liars! They never went there, they simply harvested my email address.
4) So, they “take the liberty” of posting a link to my site. How nice. They bury it on a crappy page, that has no PageRank and isn’t indexed by Google. Now. why is that? Oh yeah, their site is called FreePageRank. Spam City.
5) And they want me to link, not to the Spam Directory they made, but to a Spammy site about cell phones. Geez.
6) And my personal favorite, it is signed by the “Campaign Manager” as if this is some kind of ghost or something. I don’t care if it is automated, somebody had to press the button to startup the Spam Campaign – get THAT person’s name in here … at least we would have a live person to deal with.
7) And some checking on the email headers produces numerous domains that this email went through and they are on quite a few blacklists.

If you are still doing link building this way, have some pride and do it right – don’t do the above. It is just bad on-line business.