Almost weekly I get offers to put up a link to some other site, in return for their putting a link to my site. Almost always I decline for a variety of reasons. Some of these cases i could have done a bit of effort and made it whole, but if they haven’t done their homework or approached me properly, i say why bother? Here are some of my favorite reasons. Do you have some others?
- I have no control of the anchor text on their end of the reciprocity.
 - Their page rank is less than mine
 - Their information is out of date
 - There are too many outbound links on that page
 - There are ads on the page
 - The Title Tag on the page does not contain keywords I consider important to my domain
 - I don’t have control over the description meta tag
 - The image of my site has no alt text, and is out of date
 - They don’t use the title attribute in their outbound links
 - Their email to me seemed generated and impersonal
 
Notice I don’t have any design issues with their page. Text is still gold for seo.
Please let me know if you have other reasons for declining someone’s seeming good intentions…