I love stories like this: A half clueless SEO “accidentally” spams a cnet.com email address with a reciprocal link request and instead they do a feature story about link building INCLUDING a link to the SEO’s client.

Here’s a link to the article: Link Exchanges: The poor man’s SEO

The post starts out explaining why links are important and includes a few good, general pieces of advice from Danny Sullivan.

“if you’re a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion.”

The article later explains how the SEO came to send them the link request:

“…[the email] was a mistake, he said; the result of prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along his site’s information and offer a link exchange.”

The best part of this whole article is that he actually ended up getting a nice (one way) link from cnet.com for his client after all.  Who knew?