I just received this email:

“Hi I’m a uk seo company, how could I get a link from your site to my site
from a high page ranking page please paid or free, not interested in
banners etc just a simple text link to my site thanks.”

Hmmm. No offence, but if you were a UK seo company of any merit, one look at our hobo site and you should have realised:

  1. We do not sell links, on any site we operate on, including this Hobo site. All links are editorially approved and are either, clients, contributors, contextual ads, the odd spam post, or affiliated sites that are part of the Hobo empire :)
  2. Although I do admit I’ve chased high PR pages in the past, today I’d actually want a link on an important page that has a decent amount of visitors and links to it. If a lot of people are linking to a page on a site, this is probably a good sign of the quality of that page, depending on the number of outbounds on that page. It probably means the page is one of the most visited pages on the site, and naturally, will have a higher Real PR. Google probably likes that page. So i would like it.
  3. If you’d had looked at our site you’d have realised you could get a free link if you became one of our blog commentators and join in a discussion on one of our 150 posts.
  4. An SEO would have discovered we Do-follow links, meaning… well if you’re a search engine optimization company, you’ll know what this means.
  5. Didn’t you hear, some people think PR is a goner.
  6. Didn’t you also hear that for a long time professional seos have questioned the relevance of Google Page Rank (PR) in today’s seo industry?

Now don’t get me wrong - I’m not criticising just for the sake of it. If you sent this email, please, take part in the blog, get a link. If your site isn’t a bad neighbourhood (we do try and determine this) you can have a free editorially approved, search engine friendly link in exchange for intelligent contribution on this site.

On the whole, I don’t give out links to just anybody. Sometimes though, if I really appreciate a contributor, respect a point of view or make pals through blogging here or on their site or on my personal site, I’ll drop them a valuable link back, just ask Andy or Jim, who currently have a couple of decent links on the Hobo home page (a PR 7 if you’re interested) and Shell who I recently dropped an anchor text bonus her way, and it only cost them the price of a good conversation - nada.

Perhaps I’m just not used to answering emails looking for links or I think it’s just not creative enough to interest me. Creativity is a big part of seo for me. If you’re sending emails like this I’d question how you’re promoting yourself within the seo community, and if you cant do it properly in your own industry, what hope have you got doing it in other industries for clients?

Ho-hum, at least it wasn’t a real spammy unsolicited email and you at least had relevance and citation in mind, unlike other seo companies i won’t mention…. today.

It’s been a long day. Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh….

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