Whenever embarking on a link exchange strategy as part of your link building efforts its important to check periodically that the links to your site are still in place.

Its important that you do NOT use any automated tool to do this and here are a few reasons why and what you should do.

Some unscruplous webmasters or even SEO companies use link exchanges as a means of gaining one way links to their or a clients site.

Their method is pretty simple, they accept your link exchange, but at a later date that page would be orphaned. It only connected to his old set of link pages, and not the main site. (therefore would eventually be deindexed, but would show up if you used an automated link check tool, beacause they check the URL to see if your link it there.)

The best way to check that reciprocal link are still in place and not hidden on orphaned pages is to go to Yahoo or MSN and look at all of the links pointing to your link exchange partners site.

Then go to the link exchange pages on that site, how many links are outgoing to other sites?

Does the search engine show many links from other sites, and those sites don't have recip links pointing to them?

Its a sure sign of someone deliberately removing links from their site so it appears as though their site has one-way links gong to it.