Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, it was fairly common practice to send out messages saying I'll link to you if you'll link to me. The messages were irritating then but perhaps they were excusable, given that everyone was still learning and most of the sites involved were the equivalent of today's Myspace pages.

Roll the clock forward eight or nine years and some people are still sending out I'll link to you if you'll link to me messages. The difference is that the sites being advertised are not someone's personal site, but commercial sites. Here's a sample forwarded to me by someone at a popular Internet site:

My name is ..., I'm the webmaster of [name removed to protect the guilty] I have visited your site (...) and I believe a link exchange could benefit us both. I'm offering you the following: If you place a link to my site in your website, I'll place a link to your website here: [url removed to protect the guilty] (PR3) I'll provide you the details. These is my site info:

Roughly translated, this amounts to:

Hi. I am trying to get traffic for a commercial site. I notice you have a page rank of 8, so I'd like a free ad on your site. In exchange I can offer you a link on a site that almost no one visits, and which consists of content lifted from the Mozilla Foundation and a deceptive domain name intended to make people think it's actually an official Firefox download but is really registered to some guy in Brazil. Oh, by the way, the page I claim to be able to place your link on has nothing to do with your site.

How many ways is that wrong? Well, sending spam - strike one! Sending multiple spams on consecutive days - strike two! Asking for a free ad - strike three! Suggesting that a link on a site that would be lucky to see 5 visitors in a day is equivalent to one on a site that gets more than 50,000 a day - strike four! (Dear Sir, I'd really like my ad to appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal; I can't afford to pay you anything, but I'll run one of your ads for free in the East Bumfuck Gazette - how does that sound to you?). Proposing to place a link on a page that has nothing to do with the content of the site you're writing to - strike five! Requesting a link to a commercial site that has nothing to do with the content of the site you're writing to - strike six! Owning a website made to mimic an official Firefox site, which consists of nothing more than a couple of pages of text, graphics ripped off from the Mozilla Foundation, a few download links pointing to other sites, and some paid Google ads - strike seven!

There's another strike against them which might be less obvious. The site for which a link is requested is owned and hosted in the UK. The sender and the site on which they offer to place a backlink appear to be Peruvian. So the odds are good that this isn't someone promoting their own site; the actual spam is being sent by a business that has taken money from them in exchange for 'promoting' their site. The site owner, who has probably been sold a 'search engine optimization' package, may have no idea that their site is being promoted by spam.

Link exchange requests aren't innocuous. They're simply another kind of spam and the senders are the same kind of rip-off merchants responsible for all the other spam you get.