OK, calm down. You have to admit - I got your attention.

Seriously now, the most effective method I have found for obtaining free, non-reciprocal links is to tell the site owner that something is wrong with his/her site. I don’t really mean to say that you should pick the site apart. You should very helpfully and politely let them know that there is a broken link, missing graphic, spelling mistake or some other error on such and such a page.

As long as it’s helpful and written in a polite and friendly, chatty manner you’ll convince the site owner you have been to the site - score one for you - and that you are interested in helping them make it an even better site than it already is - now you’re in their good books.

Once that you have their attention and they are in a grateful mood you might as well mention, just as an aside, that you happen to have a site on a similar topic that might of interest to their site’s viewers. If they want to have a look it’s at www.pleaselinktome.com. Keep up the good work and all that.

Now, it can take time to find a mistake on a site and site owners know this. Thus they will believe you are a real person, not just some scummy link bot and that you were actually on their site rather than sending out random emails from a link building “battery farm” on the Indian sub-continent.

Your link request is all about them and their site. Not yours. Everybody loves hearing about themselves and people are usually genuinely grateful you took the time to help them out and so be more willing to take the time to look at your site.

Give it a shot - it’s always worked for me. It’s also worked on me. I don’t often give links from my main site to people who request them - I prefer to link to sites I find - but when I got an email informing me of a broken link on one of the pages of SEM Guide and then asking if I could take a look at their “relevant” site with a view to maybe including it in my list of resources I did.

So there you go, apparently someone else already knows about this little secret - of course it was a link building firm so they should know.