What do the following have in common?

1. Discount Spa Covers
2. Childcare products
3. Poland Translation Services
4. Telephone Headsets
5. Executive life coaching
6. Eye Surgery in Houston
7. Web Design Courses
8. London Flatmates
9. Film and television casting calls
10. Door handles
11. Bedroom Furnishings
They're all - each and every one of them - products offered by companies that I've been asked to provide links to ("link exchanges").
We have a successful site such - with around 130,000 hits per day during the week, and around 70,000 hits per day at the weekend. And it seems to me that others want to share in our success. And I'm all for co-operation, but targeted co-operation rather than participating in Link farms. You'll note that I put in links to local businesses on our web site, I tout products that I like and use (with links too) and I encourage our customers to do the same.
Many of the requests for links that I've listed above included the sentence
"PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR AUTOMATED MAIL, IT'S ONLY A REQUEST FOR A LINK EXCHANGE." in their email. Yes, sure! Pull the other one - it's got bells on it!
The illustration? Something else that's utterly irrelevant to our activities as a training provider and hotelier in Melksham. It's a picture of the waterfront at South Queensferry, on the Firth of Forth (written 2008-11-16)
Associated topics are indexed under
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[4001] Helping search engines with appropriate 400 error codes - (2013-02-11)
[3974] TV show appearance - how does it effect your web site? - (2013-01-13)
[3896] An email marathon - (2012-10-15)
[3776] Some traps it's so easy to fall into in designing your web site - (2012-06-23)
[3745] Legal change - You need to obtain user consent if you use cookies on your website - (2012-06-01)
[3744] Short Web Addresses for Melksham - (2012-05-30)
[3734] QR codes with marketing logos embedded - (2012-05-16)
[3623] Some TestWise examples - helping use Ruby code to check your web site operation - (2012-02-24)
[3589] Promoting a single one of your domains on the search engines - (2012-01-22)
[3563] How big is a web page these days? Does the size of your pages matter? - (2011-12-26)
[3554] Learning more about our web site - and learning how to learn about yours - (2011-12-17)
[3532] Sharing the user experience - designing a form with the customer in mind - (2011-11-29)
[3491] Who is knocking at your web site door? Are you well set up to deal with allcomers? - (2011-10-21)
[3426] Automed web site testing scripted in Ruby using watir-webdriver - (2011-09-09)
[3367] Google +1 - what is it? - (2011-07-22)
[3197] Finding and diverting image requests from rogue domains - (2011-03-08)
[3149] Looking back at www.wellho.net - (2011-01-28)
[3087] Making the most of critical emails - reading behind the scene - (2010-12-16)
[3022] Retaining web site visitors - reducing the one page wonders - (2010-10-31)
[2981] How to set up short and meaningfull alternative URLs - (2010-10-02)
[2668] Is it worth it? - (2010-03-09)
[2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
[2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
[2532] Analysing Google arrivals by country of origin - (2009-12-10)
[2519] Status Page / breaks of service in early December - (2009-11-30)
[2410] Removal of technical resources from this site - (2009-09-19)
[2389] Writing with our customers words - (2009-09-01)
[2341] Koulutus, Open Source tietokone kielillä - (2009-08-09)
[2340] ldning, Open Source dator språk - (2009-08-09)
[2339] Opplæring, Open Source datamaskinen språk - (2009-08-09)
[2338] Uddannelse, Open Source computer sprog - (2009-08-09)
[2337] Opleiding, Open Source computertalen - (2009-08-09)
[2336] Formação, Open Source computador línguas - (2009-08-09)
[2335] Ausbildung, die Open-Source-Sprachen - (2009-08-09)
[2334] Formazione, Open Source computer lingue - (2009-08-09)
[2333] Formación, de los lenguajes de código abierto - (2009-08-09)
[2332] Formation, des langages Open Source - (2009-08-09)
[2225] How important is a front page ranking on a search engine? - (2009-06-09)
[2065] Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others - (2009-03-03)
[2056] Web Site Loading - experiences and some solutions shared - (2009-02-26)
[1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)
[1970] Plagarism - who is copying my pages? - (2009-01-02)
[1961] Making our things easier to find - (2008-12-26)
[1955] How to avoid duplicating web page maintainance - (2008-12-20)
[1856] A few of my favourite things - (2008-10-26)
[1833] Web Bloopers - good form design - avoiding pitfalls - (2008-10-11)
[1797] I have been working hard but I do not expect you noticed - (2008-09-14)
[1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)
[1756] Ever had One of THOSE mornings? - (2008-08-16)
[1747] Who is watching you? - (2008-08-10)
[1711] Rapid growth leads to server move - (2008-07-17)
[1653] How do Google Ads work? - (2008-05-25)
[1634] Kiss and Book - (2008-05-07)
[1630] To provide external links, or not? - (2008-05-04)
[1610] PHP course dot co, dot uk - (2008-04-13)
[1554] Online hotel reservations - Melksham, Wiltshire (near Bath) - (2008-02-24)
[1541] Colour, Composition or Content - (2008-02-16)
[1534] Where in the world / country is my visitor from? - (2008-02-07)
[1513] Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python! - (2008-01-20)
[1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
[1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
[1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
[1437] Above the fold with First Great Western - (2007-11-19)
[1297] Stuffing content into a web page - easy maintainance - (2007-08-09)
[1237] What proportion of our web traffic is robots? - (2007-06-19)
[1212] What brought YOU to our web site? - (2007-06-01)
[1207] Simple but effective use of mod_rewrite (Apache httpd) - (2007-05-27)
[1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
[1186] Two new pages / sites - (2007-05-14)
[1184] Finding resources - some pointers - (2007-05-13)
[1177] Sorting out for a site map - (2007-05-05)
[1104] Drawing dynamic graphs in PHP - (2007-03-09)
[1055] Above the fold - (2007-01-28)
[1029] Our search engine placement is dropping. - (2007-01-11)
[1015] Search engine placement - long term strategy and success - (2006-12-30)
[994] Training on Cascading Style Sheets - (2006-12-17)
[976] Santa at the station - (2006-12-09)
[916] Driving customers away - (2006-11-07)
[893] Visibility - (2006-10-14)
[800] Effective web campaign? - (2006-07-12)
[767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
[757] Horse and Python training - (2006-06-12)
[732] Where is a web site visitor browsing from - (2006-05-24)
[718] Protecting images from theft - (2006-05-12)
[681] Mirroring a dynamic site - (2006-04-12)
[658] Keeping the visitors happy and browsing - (2006-03-26)
[649] Denial of Service ''attack'' - (2006-03-17)
[533] Bigger Box Campaign - (2005-12-18)
[528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
[510] Dynamic Web presence - next generation web site - (2005-11-29)
[492] New Navigation Aid - Launch of My Wellho - (2005-11-11)
[414] Form Madness - (2005-08-14)
[376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
[369] CMS - the minefield of Choices - (2005-07-05)
[348] Graveyard pages - (2005-06-15)
[347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
[322] More maps - (2005-05-23)
[320] Ordnance Survey - using a 'Get a map' - (2005-05-22)
[314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
[311] Growth pains - (2005-05-14)
[288] Colour blindness for web developers - (2005-04-22)
[284] The Iconish language - (2005-04-19)
[278] Cover all the options - (2005-04-13)
[276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
[274] Our most popular resources - (2005-04-10)
[268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
[261] Putting a form online - (2005-03-29)
[259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
[222] Who are all these visitors? - (2005-02-20)
[202] Searching for numbers - (2005-02-04)
[197] Allow for peak traffic on your web site - (2005-02-01)
[182] Your personal Google ranking - (2005-01-19)
[179] The hunt for unique words - (2005-01-16)
[173] Data Mining - (2005-01-09)
[165] Implementing an effective site search engine - (2005-01-01)
[142] Colour for access - (2004-12-06)
[117] A case of case - (2004-11-14)
[109] URLs - a service and not a hurdle - (2004-11-04)
[98] No more 'Error 404' pages. Something better. - (2004-10-24)
[32] Web design platoon - (2004-08-29)
[23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)
35f8
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