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If you are starting on the difficult road of reciprocal link building, then some off the shelf software that will help you check the incoming links is a good idea. You need to be running regular checks of all you incoming links to make sure that they haven’t hidden or removed your links and that they haven’t implemented any tricks that will hide your link from the search engines.

Also, as people find your links, ideally your software will run these basic checks against each proposed link, allow you to vet the links and then list them in a categorised way. The links software that I use for this purpose is usually Link Machine and I’ve used it on plenty of my own sites, as well as customers’ sites.

It’s not perfect, there are ways around the checks that various people know how to exploit, so you need to be on your guard against them. But the package has a basic version that is free to install and is easy to publish and set up. What’s more, it has many additional search engine features such as the ability to randomly change the page you are requesting people link to and also the text that they are using. This means that there is a good variety in the incoming links, which might help to trick the search engines into deciding that they are genuine links, rather than generated reciprocal links. The thinking behind this being that generated links will normally always use the same anchor text and destination page.

As I said, there are many tricks that I’ve seen people use to try to get free links. Link Machine will check for many cheats, such as rel=”nofollow”, but it doesn’t check that the page is actually accessible to the search engines.

Link Machine also checks that offered links are from different pages, but some paid Search Engine Optimisation experts are getting around this. Instead of giving a link from a different site each time, they just add a parameter to the name of the page, which the page ignores. Link Machine sees the parameter and assumes they are genuinely different pages, whereas in reality they are identical.

I assume that the reason for this is that these so called experts are actually not visiting sites, but instead using scripts to submit their links and this parameterised page means they don’t need to put any effort into building new links pages.

So how do you detect and prevent this happening? Well, it’s not easy. On the whole these pages come from a standard couple of web site names, which are not the same as the one you are being asked to link to. Usually, the site also doesn’t have a home page and isn’t listed on the search engines.

To prevent these fake 3 way links but allow good ones through, I just permit 3 way links where the page has a page rank. If the page is ranked or from the same site then I’m happy to allow Link Machine to do it’s business, which it does well.