Every website owner at one time or another has received at least one link exchange request if not hundreds of them. Many of the link exchange requests are very poorly written and we discard them immediately. Once in a while though I get a really well written one in my inbox. I received one like this today. I won’t mention who it was from, or what site they were promoting because that’s not the point. I will however use this as an example of how not to develop backlinks.
In this case the link exchange request was well written and to the point. As expected I performed my diligence on the company and the person requesting the exchange. In the process of doing so I ran a few searches in the major search engines on the persons name + the name of the company they were promoting.
I was not surprised when I found plenty of backlinks on blogs from this person about the site they were promoting. So, I clicked through to a few and read the postings. What I found was blog spam. The comments were consistently the same and simply pointed the user to a URL back to the site they were promoting. Time and again I saw the exact same spammy post.
Most of these comments will get removed as spam so these kinds of backlinks are not worth the effort expended to create them.
The right way to do this is to provide meaningful content that a reader of the blog in question will derive value from. In the process make reference to the site your promoting only when it makes sense to do so. In other words if the your site has content relevant to the blog posting your commenting on. This same principle applies to comments in forums. Provide meaningful content and people will be drawn to your site to find out more.
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