Link Management

Here's a tip off. If you're reading advice about linking that promotes some complex strategy that will "beat the search engines", but it completely glosses over the data management challenges, then you are reading the thoughts of someone who probably talks a lot more about linking than they actually do it. If they really did a lot of this work, they'd simplify their complex strategies, and focus on the real challenge to success, which is data management.

Let's put a better foundation toward understanding this whole data management issue, with specific examples. Directory-to-directory reciprocal linking is a process that is entirely focused on data. Each site that you list in your directory and request links from will have a URL (domain name), a site title, a description, and a contact address. You might also want to track the main links page URL, and maybe even the page where your link is placed, as well as some notes about the site, if needed.

Every site will also need to fit into the categorization structure that you decide to use. You can't be effective at this work with a link directory that is just page after page of uncategorized sites. That worked in the old days, but now people will balk at linking back to you. So you need the ability to categorize sites efficiently, which means drop-down selection menus, etc.

Then, when you begin making link requests, you'll start to generate a whole new set of data. You need to track who has linked to you, and who has not, in order to avoid duplication of effort. You might also like to know if a site has been listed in your directory for a while and has never linked, or if their email address is dead. Linking requests generate a lot of email responses. You need to deal with them, individually. Some of these responses will be placement confirmations, which is a good thing, but some will be denials, unsubscribe requests, and bounces. Many will be from auto-responders, and those need to be discarded.

What's more, once you put up a link directory, other sites will want to request links from you. Unless you provide them with an online form for these requests, you will be inundated with link request email that must then be "cut and pasted" into your database. Directing these people to submit to your online form (and they should, out of courtesy) eliminates this very time consuming cut and paste task. You should also have a process that allows you to quickly approve/disapprove of these submitted links.

Also realize that link data changes. People will want to edit their listings, before they'll link back to you. Again, having a process in place that allows them to "self-edit" is a real time saver for you.

It's also nice to have efficient ways to import new link prospects into your database. Pasting them in one-by-one is no fun.

Finally, once you've massaged all of this data, you'll need to generate a link directory for your site. The best way to do that is with an application that merges your page template with your link data, creating a multi-page, well-categorized, professional looking link directory on the fly.
Making Links Pages from Data
Page generation is one area where even the best designed, home-brewed "spreadsheet" data management methods start to break down. They can't generate a multi-page link directory without a lot of manual cut and paste work. Doing this every time you need to make an update gets very old, very fast. And costly.

Now you can start to see that a rudimentary linking effort with a weak data management process will reach its maximum capacity quickly. It will break down under the weight of the data that is thrown at it, as well as the inefficiency of dealing with it. A poorly designed process might be dirt cheap at the outset, but it costs a fortune in labor, and it can't keep pace in a competitive environment.