Website owners, you have been repeatedly informed by Internet pundits that backlinks to your site are the only way to get your site on the first page of the search engine results, right? Backlinks, of course, being those wonderful contacts with other sites in your industry that show your place to be of some importance in that industry. And so you attempt to garner those links by contacting other webmasters and replying affirmatively to attempts by others to link with you, right?
Have you noticed an increase in those attempts by websites specializing in SEO (search engine optimization) promising to link you with such and such a site? Their email usually states that if you will set up a link with a specific website, they will see to it that that site links with you; usually that site has a page rank equal or superior to your own. It looks like a good deal for both of you! But that might not be the case: lately some SEO sites have been promising one thing and providing quite another!
You are probably also aware that some of the search engines (Google being the most prominent) reportedly subtract outgoing backlinks from your page-rank equation. There is some doubt that this is actually the case, but the SEO sites mentioned above are trading on that belief by linking your website to the promised website and then backlinking to your site with their own SEO site. What that means is that you have spent an outgoing link to increase another site’s page rank, but decreased your own by that same measure--or worse! How highly do you think Google grades a backlink from an SEO site? Hardly a Quid pro quo!
Since the beginning of time--link sharing time--proper etiquette required the requesting site to provide a link first before asking for yours. Not to mention sharing with the requesting site and not some peripheral non-entity! Wise website owners might want to continue to demand that courtesy before they accept a link-sharing request.
Technology 
