We’ve received this email from one of our clients:

Since our new website went live, we’re getting a lot of proposals of this nature. Wondered what your thoughts were on these opportunities?

—– Original Message —–

Hello,

Let’s do a 3-way link swap with your website ***. I’ll give you two links in exchange for one from you.
3-way linking is a very effective link building strategy. Since you’re getting the links from third party websites, they appear totally natural to search engines. Such inbound links help your website rank higher in Google and other search engines.

google-pagerank

We wouldn’t recommend link swaps, not unless there’s a genuine benefit to your website’s visitors going off your site to these other third-parties.

Google does look at the quantity and, importantly, the quality of inbound links to your website as one way it measures the popularity of your pages. However, Google (and other search engines) can detect artificial link swapping and they strongly frown upon the practice (and may penalise or ban your website). There’s an article from Google that explains more about it’s view on link swapping.

This type of message above is purely spam and they’ll be sent to 1,000s of recipients at a time, using a mail merge feature to include your website address so it looks like the email message has been personalised!

So the short answer is just ignore these types of request! Link swapping is generally not good practice.