link exchange - pulling a fast one on me

This morning I got a rather sugar sprinkled email from a webmaster asking to exchange links. Besides the extra dose of 'sweetness' to the mail, a few other things raised doubts such as 'howdy' and the way the link was set up 'meet our new friends...'

I opened my email in Chrome and on clicking the reciprocal link, it threw up further suspicions.. the regular posts were updated once in march/april/ and strangely the link to my site was made on June 6th, which instead of appearing at the top was way down below.

Further researching the site (this time by going directly to the site) via firefox.. what do you expect.. no reciprocal link. Viewing the source code and finding the plugins responsible for it.. I laughed to myself about this webmaster who intended to get some link juice off my site.

Thanks to BHW, not only does this forum help in seo but also gives you the knowledge to stop tricks such as these.

I can't complain really.. what goes around comes around.. I suppose

Yay, so the Nigerians are doing link exchange scams nowadays!

Could've been me =)

What's your site again?

Nah, wasn't me - yet! Though I got the plug-in so I'll test it out in July.

Congrats to the winners.

I've been scam like that too once long ago.

And your problem with this is?

Yeah I 've had that too, sometimes they use CSS to hide the link from showing but the backlink still shows up in search engines. I used to get requests everyday from warez sites about something similar to this but by reading the email and looking at the poor grammar, as well as looking at email headers and analysing the site, told me something smelt fishy...

Another thing is I still get link exchange requests for a couple of old sites I pulled down off the net 2 years ago, bloody amateurs!