As you are probably aware, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising
the search engine rankings and generating more traffic to both of our
websites.

Imagine this sent to my contact email for this site!

After getting an umpteenth email like this, I lost patience and decided to reply the lame link exchanger:

Hi,

Prior to spamming everyone out there with your link exchange requests take
some effort and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Does the site I am about to spam look like they practice link exchange?

2. Is the site at least somehow related to what I am trying to get them to
link to?

If the answer is “no” to both, think of what you’re searching in the
search engines and maybe you need to refine your queries to come up with
better potential link exchange partners.

You think they would at least understand what I am on about?

<div id="google-ads" class="prepend-2"><!-- need a better name for this div -->
        <ul>
            <li><a class="offsite current" href="">Ads by Google</a></li><!-- remove inline style later -->
            <li><a class="offsite" href="">Blog Directory</a></li>
            <li><a class="offsite" href="">Video Blog</a></li>
            <li><a class="offsite" href="">Blogger Photos</a></li>

            <li class="last"><a class="offsite" href="">Blog Gratuito</a></li>
        </ul>
    </div>

Have they forgotten to place the real Google ads in place of this bit? Have they even intended to? “need a better name for this div”? – who wants a better name for a div that will contain Google’s Adsense code? Are Technorati IT people experimenting on a live site with multi-million visitor audience? Do they intend to pass something else for Google ads in the future? If modifying Google ads code is a crime as per G’s AdSense TOS, then shouldn’t this be even worse? (haven’t been messing with AdSense for ages so can’t be sure but seems like G doesn’t like this much either)

Yea, talk about large online media giants’ screw ups… (Hits “Publish” and pings Technorati)

This is the email newsletter people got from MySpace called MySpace Buzz:

Just how much effort does it take to test an email template before sending it off to millions of your users?

But wait, it gets even better. Here is another bit of that same email:

So these are the people I may know – oh really? Don’t they have enough funding any more at MySpace to keep decent tech staff?

And what’s even funnier, I will probably end up ranking for “MySpace Buzz” like I did (and still do) for “MySpace Media Kit” – the Google SERPs where MySpace’s actual media kit is nowhere to be found. I wonder how many advertising deals they lost due to this? Too bad finding out whether it’s possible to become their affiliate and direct people  to their advertising info is equally difficult to finding the media kit itself because people used to contact me a lot asking how to get it. Now I wonder, will I get inquiries about their screwed up newsletter as well? The worst bit is that I cannot even suggest to the folks at MySpace that they should probably just hire me to fix all their crap since they most likely treat their online reputation the same way they treat their advertising deals*, newsletter and everything else so they won’t even know I have posted this.

*at least till lately – now they are probably so starved for advertising money they finally placed a link to their advertising info right in their footer