Alright I promise this will be the last posting I do on the topic of linking for a while.

Over the weekend I decided to finally stop putting off the chore of verifying all the back links allegedly coming to my site. A quick search in the search engines found a nice little program free that made the verification as painless as possible. Given the fact that I have approximately 60 pages of links, the automation process really came in handy even though after two days I only had about half of the pages of links verified.

To be honest I was completely shocked at what I found when reading the reports on the completed pages. It seems on the average only about 30% of the completed link exchanges where honored. Now to be fair, the 60% who appeared to not be honoring the link trading agreement, probably more than half of those came back as uncompleted link searches. The reason being that the sites being spidered were too large and were taking a lot of time, faster to just send emails requesting the location of my link.

Now, if we take that 60% and split that in half we are still talking about another 30%. When we combine this to the 30% honored link exchanges, we have approximately 60% of my traded links still intact. Slightly better than half, not too bad eh? Absolutely not! This means I have been giving away hundreds of one way links for far too long.

When dealing with reciprocated link exchanges it is always a good idea to regularly verify that these links are maintained. Myself I have been so busy that I let this chore slide for too long but you can bet that I am not going to let that happen again. Some webmasters bank on the fact that people wont verify their links, don’t become one of those webmasters like I did. As a webmaster I have to remember that I am a webmaster first and an Internet marketing consultant second.