If you’re like most people who do link exchanges, you most likely get a bunch at a time and then forget about them… This post is for you.

Go back and check your list of link swaps right now. Chances are, probably about half of those sites are no longer linking to you. A lot of the other sites will be completely non-existent.

You need to constantly monitor your link exchanges. It is critical to your site’s success. Let’s look at the possibilities:

  1. A link swap with a related site removed your link. Most likely he/she just did this because they thought they could get away with it. It’s not very likely that they accidentally removed your link. Remove their link right away and forget about them. If that link exchange is important to you, email that site owner and see if you can get it back up.
  2. A link swap with a unrelated site removed your link. This is bad news because Google doesn’t even like you linking with unrelated sites in the first place. A non-reciprocal link to an unrelated site looks very spammy, almost like you are selling links for page rank. This can get your search engine rankings penalized (or even worse). If you are thinking about doing a link exchange with an unrelated site, think twice.
  3. The site you were previously linked with is gone. The server is down, there is a 401 error, whatever. You do not want to be linking to a site that doesn’t exist. Google will penalize you big time for this (I have seen it before personally). Get these links off your site ASAP.

If you have too many link exchanges to monitor, you might want to think about shrinking that list down. The more links you have on your site, the less Page Rank each link will transfer. And the less PR that transfers, the lower YOUR pages will be ranked in search engines.

So, it’s all connected… make sure you have a working site with working links and Google won’t penalize you.