"John F. Carr" <jfc@mit.edu> wrote in message
news:42333987$0$562$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu...
>
> I received three substantially identical emails beginning
> "Hi,
> I took a look at your site a couple of hours ago...
> and I want to tell you that I'd really love to trade links with you. I
> think
> your site has some really good stuff related to my site's topic of
> (topic)"
>
> (topic) is different in each of the messages, "radar detectors",
> "driving school", and "criminal records"; these are vaguely related
> to my page http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/laws.html about traffic law.
> The mail goes on to say that the site links to mine and invites me
> to put a reverse link on my page to www.(topic)hq.com. Obviously
> the text is a computer-expanded template but the placement of the
> links to my site seems to have been done by computer rather than
> manually.
>
> The body is base64 encoded plain text which makes me think there is
> an attempt to get past a filter.
>
> What's up with this? Legitimate directory site, attempt to trick
> search engines, or something else? I'm asking here because I'm
> betting on the second, and I wonder if this sort of trick is common.
>
> --
> John Carr (jfc@mit.edu)

Count your self lucky if this is the first time you have received a request
like this. When you start getting half a dozen a day you will soon
be able to spot them and just trash them.
Most of the time they are just affiliate pages put up with adsense and
amazon links on them.