Do you check reciprocal links?

Do you check your reciprocal links to ensure they are still reciprocal? You should do?

If you use an automated link building directory software, like I do on many sites, then many people are adding their links to your sites. And I regularily check to see who is actually linking back. I expect, through experience, that around 30% of people requesting links with me will actually remove the link to me within a month or 2!

Now some lost links will be expired sites, mistakes, pages temporarily unavailable, but not 30%! Most are new requests that no longer link to me.

These are people that are trying to get 1 way links in and are assuming that I'm probably not going to be checking to see if they are linking to me. It's a hard job to check across so many sites, but it needs to be done. Else you end up with page after page of links out and hardly any links it.

It's devious of these people, but with decent link building software it's easy enough to do. You just press a button and let the software get on with the job. By removing these people that aren't linking to you, your links directory is cleared up and leaves space for new link exchanges:

1 - this keeps the content on these pages fresh

2 - you aren't linking to unnecessary pages

3 - if keeping to under a limit of links, this prevents you having to create new pages, which means people complain that they are on page 2, which isn't cached, please move me to page 1, which is PR3...