About once a month I get an email from a client who received a message similar to the message below:

Dear Manager,


We are a professional Internet consultant organization in Asia, which mainly deal with the global companies’ domain name registration and internet intellectual property right protection. Currently, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company. On 2009-03-19, we received an application formally; one person named “Jacques Tits” wanted to apply for the Internet brand “yourdomainnamehere” and some domain names through our body. During our preliminary investigation, we found that these domain names’ keyword and internet brand is identical with your trademark. I wonder whether you consigned "Jacques Tits" to register these domain names through us or not? Or is "Jacques Tits" your business partner or distributor in Asia? Currently, we have postponed this application of this company temporarily already. In order to deal with this issue better, please let the principal make a confirmation with me by telephone or email ASAP.
In addition, I must state that we have time limited for one person or one company’s registration. It is just 15 days. If your company files doesn't resent within the time limited. We will unconditionally authorize the application of “Jacques Tits".

Thank you for your cooperate.

Best Regards,

Leo Chan
Registration Commissioner
Sponsoring Registrar:World Wide Network
Tel: +852 3115 2295
Fax: +852 3072 3223
Email:leo@worldwidedomain.asia


Let me tell you it's crap... These guys are trying to scare you into purchasing a domain with a .cn extension or some other extension to "protect your brand" The domain will cost you a bunch and most of the time is not necessary. This is a scam. DELETE!
About once per day I get a "automated" type of link exchange request asking me to exchange links on one of our clients sites. They Usually look something like this:
Hello,


We are an online based company, we run a network of blogs, and wondering if you would like to trade links with us?

we would give your site a prominent listing on our pages at:

http://www.sunglassesfashion.com/links.php

If you would be willing to exchange links we us, please use the following:


------------------------------------------------
Title: Designer sunglasses
URL: sunglassesfashion.com
Description: Authentic designer sunglasses for mens & womens including Bvlgari, Chanel, Christian Dior and much more.
------------------------------------------------


Please let us know where you added our links so we'll add yours on our pages as well.

Thank you


Joana


PLEASE NOTE:

This email is not spam, it was manually sent by us, our sole purpose being to introduce ourselves to you with no obligation on your part.

Your email address was found to be publicly available on your website and it has not been added to any list. We consider this to be a polite way to contact you and apologise sincerely if you have been inconvenienced in any way.

We are legally obliged to offer you an 'OPT-OUT' from future mailings from us; should you wish to exercise this right, please reply with "OPT-OUT" in the subject field.


Not a bad letter overall but totally unsolicited. The problem is I don't have any websites related to glasses, sunglasses etc.

If your considering link building don't waste your time just blasting out links to anyone and everyone. Make a targeted effort to find sites that compliment yours. If your site is about web development target a hosting company or some other type of business services company. The search engines not only look at incoming links but also were those links are from.

One great way to build incoming links is to write articles about a topic that relates to your business. Include a link to your business or service in the article as a plain text link. Don't sell in these articles inform. Everyone wins with this approach. You get a great link from some relevent content back to your site and the site publisher gets some good content for their site.

Until next time!

JB