Sorry for posting a reply on a very old post :D. Your blog is like a great tree, sadly I started from the top (not so smart).

Anyway, this post interests me because I too problems with linkers seeking reciprocal links everyday.

Because of like 20 to 50 emails a day with contents of “Please put a link back to us…”. I decided to create a link directory where it is automated (it’s done but did not try to put it near my site for now). They have to add their own links to the directory and input all information needed including the reciprocal URL, if the system cannot see our link in the reciprocal page then of course they can never add their link.

I also covered the pain on managing approved links already added in the database. I let the “cron do its job” running a crawler ever 12:00 AM everyday to check all approved reciprocal URLs in the database, deleting right away all entries where we cannot find our link or contains a dead URL.

Im sure your dev team already has this idea but I hope I shared something useful to you.

Glenn