What to check on existing links

Every month, at least, you should check ALL of the links you have exchanged. If any aren't playing ball, then contact the site owner, or be like me (a lack of patience) and just delete them.

Why, well why link to a site that's not playing fair and linking to you? It's of no benefit to you. Removing the link teaches them a lesson and means that the number of out links goes down and the space on your links pages goes up - more room for good links.

So what are you watching for?

First and foremost, is the site you are linking to still live and is the page that your link was put on also still live? If the site has gone, certainly delete the link. If the page has gone, then either ask the owner why or delete it. If your link isn't on the page you were expecting to, it's possible that you have moved up or down a page, so check that.

Next I refer to this blog and lock back to see when I've last recorder page rank updates. I give sites the benefit of the doubt, I'm not looking for the most recent update, but the date of the update before that. That would mean that the check in progress looks back not to the 2nd May update, but the 29th February update. Allow a week before that (it takes Google a week to prepare page ranks) and (bear with me) I then expect sites that I've exchanged links with prior ro 22nd February to at least have a page rank 0. My thinking being that they have been included in 2 page rank updates, so should have been noticed by now.

If the page linking to me is grey barred, then I consider deleting my link. It's likely that either there's something wrong with their page structure or site, or they are blocking the link.

Also, and my link building software does this for me, check that the site owner hasn't changed their robots.txt file and hasn't slipped rel=nofollow into your link. If they have, they are up to sly tricks. You could contact them and ask them why, but if they are up to tricks, they will probably do something else.

My moto when it comes to accepting links is simple - "if in doubt, delete it!"

Tey, that's pretty harsh. Why, well where's the point in having 200 links in from non-cached pages? I've just deleted around 250 links from my comparemortgagerates.co.uk website, leaving around 400 active. Why, well most weren't linking back to be for whatever reason, but the rest just weren't giving me anything in return.

Remember that Google's guidelines don't have anything against structured links directories of selected sites - it's free for all links they don't want. As long as there is an element of links being rejected / deleted then it is accepted that you aren't free for all and you shouldn't upset Google and so on.

So I've just made room on my links pages for plenty more new sites. No doubt 30% will quickly remove my link, but I'll remove theirs in return.