Link Exchange Project

This project involves sending emails to prospective web sites and requesting a link exchange. The job is to exchange just with sites that are on this page: <[login to view URL]> Our site is a visual bird identification search engine with a great deal of traffic but a Google PR that is not yet commensurate with these traffic levels. At one time we had a PR6 but then moved to a new domain and now we have a PR4. We want to get it back up to 6 or 7 and a link exchange will help. The message we wish to send each of the web sites is attached to this bid request. Your job is to send the email to the webmaster or owner of each of these sites and keep a list of what sites have responded in a spreadsheet. You will use an email address we will assign to send your emails so I have a running log of the messages and can jump in when there is a question you can't answer. The links for the web sites we are requesting an exchange with are already set up on our resources page so we can say they are already linked. We will ask the sites you contact to put a link to our home page ([[login to view URL]][1]) and explain we are a highly trafficked site and that we get 60,000 visitors a month so this will help there PR as well as the community of birders in general. There are about 120 links. I will pay a fixed fee for the job (which would be your bid) plus an additional bonus of $1.50 for each successful link exchange. The job requires that you are diligent about finding the correct email address of the web site, making sure your message gets to the webmaster, and monitoring the requests. The goal is to end up with as many link exchanges as possible. ## Deliverables 1) All deliverables will be considered "work made for hire" under U.S. Copyright law. Buyer will receive exclusive and complete copyrights to all work purchased. (No GPL, GNU, 3rd party components, etc. unless all copyright ramifications are explained AND AGREED TO by the buyer on the site per the coder's Seller Legal Agreement). * * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Monday Jan 9, 2006 12:47:42 PM: I have a question that seems to have a lot of different answers, and I would like to clear this up before I award this project. I would appreciate hearing your answer. My understanding is that if you want to get a high PR on your site you need to find sites to exchange links with that have both a high PR and a topic that is relevant to your visitors. In other words my resource page contains only links from sites related to birding, the subject of my site. Some people believe it does not matter what the subject of the linking site is, it could be credit cards, drugs, mortgages, etc. As long as they have a high PR it will raise your PR if they are linked to you. These could be link farms, and I have heard and read to stay away from these kinds of sites. So my question is this: do link exchanges with sites that are not at all related to your topic a good idea or a ba d idea. * * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Monday Jan 9, 2006 3:21:40 PM: Many people have answered my question about relevancy of link exchanges. One bidder said it most succinctly and most of the responses seem to agree with him: "The subject of the site that links to you has no bearing on your PR. However, the subject of the site that ranks to you has great bearing on your actual ranking on the search engines. So, a link from a related site is a lot better than one from a unrelated site (all other things being equal.)" If you disagree please let me know. I also realized that there is some ambiguity in my bid request regarding 1) when is the job considered complete and 2) how will I get paid for links that are established. I will modify my bid request to clarify these questions. * * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Wednesday Jan 11, 2006 1:14:21 PM: I will pay you a bonus each time 20 links have been successfully exchanged (e.g. $30). Because some webmasters take a long time to exchange links I will set a deadline of 6 months, anything after that won't be counted or paid for as it's just too much work to keep track of a few links that come in so late in the project. The fixed part of the payment for the job will be made in two payments. 50% will be paid two weeks from starting (provided all the email messages have been sent out). The remaining 50% will be paid six weeks after starting. I spread the payments out to make sure that you in fact are diligent about checking that the webmaster has received the message and responded. I understand some link exchanges will fail a nd some will only require filling out a form, and I figure those will balance each other out in the long run. If this job goes well I have another much larger collection of links to try exchanging (about 4000). Another job will be organizing the links into better categories instead of a giant scrolling list like I have now and adding descriptions for our visitors. Also it's been pointed out to me we need to add anchor text to our link and an alt tag. And it would be good to include a small logo should the web master want to use it, and I will set up a link to that so we can still send an text email with no attachments. * * *This broadcast message was sent to all bidders on Wednesday Jan 11, 2006 2:10:05 PM: To help clarify payment on this project I have updated the ZIP file that desribes the project in detail. ## Platform Windows