If you are the ‘Lucky’ recipient of any public email address like ‘info’ or ‘webmaster’ you are most likely receiving the links exchange request emails every week now. Someone is informing you that they have placed a link to your site or that they will place a link to your site as soon as you place a link to their site. They also take (your) time to explain you the benefits of the link building.
Under the current Irish legislation even the Irish company can send emails like that to any other Irish business. I see it as an obvious failure of the law to protect us from the SPAM. It is irritating because there is no really reliable and effective cure for the SPAM today.
So should you accept and put the links to all those web sites in return from the link obtained from them?
Here are the guidelines that you can use as a test in the following order:
If the email is sent from the free email host like Gmail – NO!
If the web site does not have a lot of the content relevant (really relevant!) to your web site – NO!
If the web page where your link is has more that 50ish links to some other sites – NO!
If the web page is not in the Google index – NO!
If the web page (not the site) has a Google Page Rank lower than 3 – NO!
If the web page where your link is has a Google Page Rank more than 2 lower than your page – NO!
If you just do not like the tone in the email – NO!
If you use the filter above – you will see that 99% of those emails will not pass the test. So even without performing the test, you can safely delete and ignore all such link exchange email requests.