Dear Other Link Prospectors;
I run a major website at CJSHayward.com. It is a collection of my creative works and has increasingly been focused on Orthodox theology. Suggested starting points include Doxology and The Angelic Letters. Most of what I've written for reading (as opposed to e.g. open source software or artwork) is available collected in this seven volume set.
I've gotten the occasional fan (e)mail, but I have never had a fan or visitor be generically impressed with everything on my website. I've only had one visitor claim to have read everything for that matter. People who just like my work tend to give some specific compliment or thanks for some of the specific content on my site. Usually people who write fan mail are more than happy to explain what, specifically, makes them happy my site is available to them.
For that matter, I've gotten flames, and the flames in general are quite obviously written in response for some specific posting or element on my site. No one really seems to call me nasty things without some specific statement about how work on my site fully justifies the claim.
If you try to obtain a one-way backlink from my site without bothering to find out what my site is about and what some of my works are, you are failing to show me a courtesy readily shown by most haters. Please do not be offended if I regard your contact as spam and it is reported as spam.
A "Hall of Shame" example
I've gotten various link prospecting emails that in generic terms could be sent to the owners of almost any website. The most recent example of a particularly objectionable link prospecting emails is,
Subject: Thank you
Dear CJS Hayward,
Although, it is generally not in my nature to "cold-contact" people I don't know, nonetheless, I wanted to offer you my gratitude for the writings you have shared on your website. They have gotten me through some very hard days. As way of saying "thank-you", and not being at this time to make any purchases of your products, following are three website links related to one of your current posts, that I thought you may find useful. They are:
http://arachnoid.com/
(Psychology - Located on the sidebar of homepage)http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/
(Geared towards parents of gifted children, but may be useful as a general resource)[URL deleted]
(Fr. [name deleted], of the Anglican Catholic Church - His perspective on similar psychological and theological topics)I apologize in advance if these links are not useful to you. As I said, they are a humble offering in appreciation for what you have freely shared.
Thank you again,
Bryan W.
I believed what it said for a short while. I started to write a thank-you note, and then when I thought things through, I was horrified.
The first point, if a subtle one, is that like many sites on the website, my contact page contains a direct and explicit request of people contacting me: that they put "To the author" in their email subject so it gets fished out of my spam folder if need be. This is not meant as a hoop to jump through, but I ask it and the feedback form and email link on my site have a "To the author" baked right in. This provided a crystal-clear red flag that however much he may have wished for resharing, it didn't translate into respecting simple instructions. (That much, by the way, offers a useful filter, and if you are working on triaging your own incoming link prospect requests, you might include some simple and very clearly stated request on your contact page.)
The second point is that the first paragraph does not reference anything specific. Now my website does have several works intended to offer strength and comfort to people in hard times; The Best Things in Life are Free comes readily to mind. However, while some of my work has been received respectfully, this is the first report I've heard that they've helped someone quite that much. They don't deserve sole credit. I think they're good and worth reading, but I think that anyone who really benefitted from them would be benefitting from several other supports too. But I may be being too picky here; it is common practice to exaggerate some compliments so I don't want to be too legalistic.
The first psychology link left me mystified; I do not consider psychology to be a particularly active interest, and I follow my advisor in regarding psychology to be a sort of leftover that stayed around during and after a process of secularization in the West. Or maybe that's a strong way of putting it, but one post about Theory of Alien Minds: A UX Copernican Shift does not make me a credentialed psychologist nor does it make psychology a primary interest.
The second link left me mystified as regards approaching giftedness; you don't really tell gifted parents to go to Hoagie's Gifted almost like how you don't really tell web users to go to Google to find things out. Apart from my retaining the spammer's mention of Hoagie's Gifted in this posting, the only real reason I would see myself telling someone about that site would be if I got an "out of the blue" email from a parent whose child was identified as gifted and the parents want a roadmap.
The third link is the cultural equivalent of saying, "You're from Japan? Say something in Chinese!" It made me profoundly uncomfortable, and there is a profound difference between Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglican "Catholics", and I was much more uncomfortable with that contact than I usually am either with mainstream Romans or mainstream Anglicans. I wanted to send the spammer a link to my reply to those Greek Catholic T-shirts that say, "Orthodox Christian in Communion with Rome," a T-shirt that says, "Roman Catholic in Communion with the Archdruid of Canterbury". (I restrained myself.)
And by the way, that wasn't really three links the sender equally wanted me to see. It was two links of window dressing and one link of payload. This was part of multiple aspects of guile in this post. It was made to give the impression of having received a great benefit, without mentioning anything in particular, and it presented the three links as a thank-you when they were, in fact, there to do the job of link acquisition. Upon reflection, I believe the email was sent in the optimistic hopes that I was born yesterday.
And the last thing I'll mention is that it is admittedly current practice to avoid the word "link" in link prospecting emails and more generically speak of sharing and passing on even though what you want most is a link. That at least might be appropriate, but the goal of this email is to obtain a white-hat one-way backlink, and there was a lot of guile and feigned respect. Sorry, no.
I am, as a site owner, willing to give links, including white-hat one-way backlinks. However, if you want something that big from me, your due diligence is to communicate honestly, research my site enough that you have some idea of its marketing proposition and some examples of its content, and if your site is a religious site, read the sharply written An Open Letter to Catholics on Orthodoxy and Ecumenism, and needless to repeat, respect the clear instructions on my contact page. Guile is one of several ways you can get reported for spam.
Owners of other high-quality sites might appreciate similar considerations.
Thanks,
CJS Hayward