There is a new reciprocal link scam that’s been going around. Instead of Webmasters emailing other Webmasters asking for reciprocal link trades, some unscrupulous Webmasters are approaching others by saying that they’ve done business with them in the past and that their link has fallen off the other person’s site and to please put it back up.
Our website has been approached by all kinds of people in the past couple of months claiming to have prior reciprocal linking relationships with us. The most recent was from a known bulk email spammer. When checking this company out of Whois it was discovered that this company was blacklisted for spamming. This website had never had a link on our website and in fact did not have any kind of links, resources or link directory page on its own site.
These scammers are trying to play on the goodwill of others hoping that Webmasters will apologetically put the link scammers link “back up” with no questions asked. It’s a nice racket for the scammers since they will receive a certain percentage of one-way links without much effort. All they have to do is accuse another Webmaster of dropping their links and many Webmasters will comply by putting up the links without further investigation.
My recommendation is to consider these emails a brand new link requests. Investigate the other website to see if you would actually like to trade links with them. Check them out on Whois to make sure they are not a ‘bad neighborhood’ website, do a search for their company name + message board to see what others in the community say about the company and find out where your link will be placed on their site. A little due diligence will go a long way.
