I get emails every day asking for links to a site, reviews of a product, and endorsements of other things. Most of the time I simply click delete and don’t even read them, but since I recently started a site that gives reviews of products, I now pay a little more attention to these things.
Yesterday I received one that I’ve seen before, but never really took the time to read through the whole proposition. They title the email “partnership opportunities” in which they share how my site is just what they are looking for. They “chose” me as a potential “link partner.” Now, you may think I should be excited that someone wants to do link exchanges with me, but as most of you should know by now, reciprocal link exchanges bring little to no value anymore to the search engine rankings of your site.
This letter though unlike many others takes their useless things they will give you in exchange to a new level. They go on to offer you 500 Facebook fans, 1,000 Twitter followers, or 5,000 YouTube views.
At first thought you may think, this is awesome! 500 more fans on my Facebook page would be great! Another 1,000 followers on Twitter? Awesome! But before you go & start linking all over your sites for the exchange, stop and ask yourself this question: Are these new fans going to be people actually interested in my product?
My guess is that the answer will more than likely be no. When companies guarantee you a certain number of fans, likes, views, or followers, they normally are purchasing these from sort of bogus company. The people who will be joining your page are probably spam accounts that were set up by some people in another country that are being paid to simply sit there all day and click like on pages with their hundreds of fake accounts. The likelihood of one of those people contacting your for business is slim to none.
So in closing, while their email seems like it might be a great business opportunity, take the time to think things through and you will quickly realize that they are simply trying to abuse your hard work with search engine rankings on your site to push their business higher. Make them put the same good SEO practices in place that you have implemented into your business that made them find you in the first place.