Forced compliance is the best way to deal with link trades

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A tip for new link traders is to keep this in mind: in order to ensure that your partners don’t cheat you, you’ll need to create a method to force compliance. I’m not sure if I’m being original with the phrase forced compliance, but I really like it.

Even if people mean no harm, you can’t take their word for executing a link trade.

Why is this? Human nature is simple, and people will abandon a link trade for any number of reasons. Among them is the prevalent attitude that a “one-way link” is the Holy Grail of web marketing. These are the type of people who always type “ethics” in quotes, as if the concept of fair play is so fuzzy that it’s downright meaningless. A large majority of SEOs appear to be of this category, and for them, forced compliance is the only logical method to ensure complete integrity of a link trade.

The best way to force compliance is automation. You need to check your partners links and pages, up front, and again on a constant basis to ensure that no malfeasance has occurred.
I suggest looking into Curl to perform this task. Make sure to check their pages for your link, and also for the presence of the “no-follow” tag.

There’s no harm in checking as often as daily if you like, although multiple times daily might be excessive. Once you’ve checked for several months, you will likely be amazed at the amount of naughtiness that has been occuring.

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