Does my aggressive link building work?

OK, so over the last month I've become very agressive / determined in deleting links that don't benefit me. Does it do any good?

Well, as I was reviewing my list of link check dates, I made an observation. In the past I've recorded the date that I've checked that links are still active. On the whole, I've deleted links that are reciprocated any more and noted that date. It was only when I neglected to do this that as an experiment when I remembered, for a couple of customer sites I tried deleting more links (they were so full of links after not checking for a few months they took ages!).

My sheet shows that from January to July 2007, every month I carefully ran my link check every month. Before that it was pretty adhoc.

There was also, at some point either before or just at the start of that period, a time when my CompareMortgageRates directory became corrupted and wouldn't add links for a few weeks - but people kept trying. Eventually I rebuilt it - with a lot of links missing. It was shortly after that it hit PR5.

What about normally? Well last year, the site's performance improved until October, then tumbled. It picked up again in January and February this year, March wasn't so good, April better and May not so good.

And whay about the links check? Well as I said above, until July I was checking monthly, then forgot it until October, then again until January. So when I was checking and for about 3 months afterwards, the site traffic was good. And when I did a full check in October, about 3 months later traffic picked up. Same again after my January check.

So it looks like careful admin of the links directory is important - let it slip and traffic falls. By checking it every month the traffic is at its best. When I let the checking slips, a couple of months later so does the traffic.

It's not instant - and that is obvious. It takes the search engines a few weeks to pick up all of the links pages and the links pages pointing in and then for Google etc to fully update their directories. Whether being more aggressive will help, I don't know. But with what happened when the directory crashed, it could be the case.