It's generally a technique that is prohibited by companies that people hired to do this type of thing. For example, people would put up gigs on Amazon Mechanical Turk, asking people to search for a particular phrase, to help them get into autosuggest.

Hi Ryhs,

Here are a couple of other Q&A threads and posts that may provide some ideas. I don't do a lot of link outreach myself, but I do get a fair amount of spam link requests that are obviously taken from a boilerplate and not customized. Those never get a response from me, unless I'm in a bad mood, and then it's not a positive response.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/when-going-about-asking-a-site-for-a-link-on-their-page-how-do-you-ask
http://www.seobook.com/art-pitching-email
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dont-ask-sites-for-links-find-people-and-connect