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I agree. The company that contacted you is doing something called ego bait.  When ego bait is done well it can be very effective.  Their goal is to write something about industry leaders and then hope that the industry leaders like it enough that they link back to it.  But, actually asking you for a link in return is kind of sad IMO. Personally I would probably not link back but it depends on the source.  If the Wall Street Journal wrote about the 100 best websites in my niche and I was included I would write a whole blog post about the fact that I was included!  But if a site made a list of 100 websites, and asked me to link back to them then I would treat that as a glorified reciprocal link exchange request.  I might possibly tweet about it depending on how good the quality was.