Keeping Tabs on Those Sneaky Link Exchange Bandits

How often do you exchange links, only to find that the other webmaster has removed your link a few months down the road? There are a lot of sneaky webmasters like that, and I refer to them as link exchange bandits.

But as much as I hate their strategy, I would have to say, it probably works quite often. I just don’t have the time to keep track of every single link exchange or link purchase, and that’s what they’re hoping for. They just want to screw you over by removing your link, while you blindly keep sending traffic to them.

Not anymore though! I just signed-up for a new service at Text Link HQ. They monitor all of your link exchanges for you!

That’s exactly what I needed, and I’m betting that 99% of webmasters need this, too. All you do is input your link details and they do the monitoring, and they’ll even alert you whenever a link is removed!

All of that for only $15! Yep, it’s a $15 lifetime fee. That sure beats those $20/month private label article sites which are worth about $0/month.

I was pretty skeptical, but so far, the site is great. I’m still skeptical about the “lifetime” membership, but the risk is certainly worth $15.

Registration

So I paid and waited for my account to be activated… and waited… and waited. My account was never activated, so I got in touch with the owner, and he got things sorted out. Turns out there was probably a problem with PayPal’s sessions.

Note: When you pay, be sure to give PayPal lots of time to load before clicking the “back to merchant” link. That should take care of any problems.

If you sign-up and can’t login though, try the “Forgot Password?” feature to get a new password sent to you. That should take care of things (and you can change your password back to what your prefer from your control panel.)

The big problem I see here is that there’s no contact email on the website. I had to get in touch with the owner through webmaster forums, which not everyone will be able to do (or won’t attempt to do.) They lose some trust factor by not including any contact info.

The test drive

Anyway, I’m in, and it’s sweet. There are just two simple steps to get it working:

1) List all the URLs that you own or buy links for.

2) Add the URLs where other sites link to yours, along with a couple details.

Then the application takes care of everything.

It’s perfect for simple link exchanges, but it can get tricky, because you have to list the link details perfectly.

For example, the program will treat all these URLs differently:

http://internetmarketingsucks.com/blog/
http://internetmarketingsucks.com/blog
http://www.internetmarketingsucks.com/blog/
http://www.internetmarketingsucks.com/blog

So remember that, or you’ll be screaming at your computer while checking links! (At least I was…)

Does it work?

I’ve already found people that have removed my links just by setting this up. I just didn’t have the time to keep track of everything before because it wasn’t this easy. But now that I have this, I’ll be cracking down on these unscrupulous webmasters!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t check for a “nofollow” tag on your link.

But despite that…

This is possibly the best $15 I’ve spent on something for internet marketing!

I’m still not sure on the ‘lifetime’ account promise, though. You can’t be 100% sure that you’ll be using this free for the next 10 years. If the site gets sold, a new owner could start doing $15/month.

But I’m happy for now!

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