I would highly recommend that everyone verify all of their reciprocal links. I spent a good portion of the morning checking all my links and I found that I had to delete 25-30 links that were dead and probably out of business.
Good Luck.
Should I keep yours? 
I went through mine the other day and found quite a few. Don’t delete them straight off, send an e-mail first, my opinion. If you get no response or link back, absolutely delete the link. Don’t spread the word for someone if they aren’t returning the favor.
David is there a program that you use to make this task easier?
I recommend that all bad links be removed. Google and other search engines will punish you with lower placement on search engine results.
Yes there is, but I have not found accurate success with it, so I will not recommend it.
It may be that those that are in fact linked to your site have not been “cashed” my the SE.
Recommendation: do not post a link till one is posted to you.
It’s just too hard to keep up with it otherwise.
For you guys that posted last week, I am behind in my linking again (school).
If you make a submit form, cut-n-paste makes it easy for you and you have provided the info for links to be made to your site and makes it easier for them.
I will get to you guys this weekend! But I need to get from behind this computer before the sun goes down!
Have farm chores to get done!
Try http://validator.w3.org/checklink and point it directly to your link page. If you have nested categories for states, make sure to tell it to check 2-3 levels deep.
Wow very cool Dom. :mrgreen:
Helps to run it at some point on your entire site. I did on mine and found links to old pages I had left up that I had since renamed, links to sites that didn’t exist, etc. Can take awhile to run on really large sites.
I am finding that out. :mrgreen:
I went through my links the old fashioned way and deleted 50 dead links.
Absolutely, I didn’t delete your links.
Am I missing something?
No, I simply go to each and every website that I’m linking to. It’s a long process but it works.
Dead links will not place you lower on search engines.
I’m simply maintaining my site.
Guys,
I’m referring to dead links, not links that are not reciprocated.
I’m finding a lot of web sites that no longer exist, so I delete them.
I thought you were going to leave all your IR business to me! 
Come on down, there’s plenty for the both of us.
That’s not necessarily true. It is believed due to several patents that have been filed that having too many dead links on your site means you’re not maintaining your site which is termed ‘site decay.’ Check out Web Decay and Broken Links Can be Bad for Your Site for some info on the patent. The people who files it are now working for Yahoo and Google.
David V.,
Thanks for the reminder to check for bad links…
I found one from your area no longer active… (JB Home Inspection Services www.jbhomeinspectionservice.com)
and…
One in Illinois that AVG detected a threat!!! (B-Sure Home Inspection & Environmental (www.b-sureinspect.com)
Sure wouldn’t want anyone to get a virus from linking through my site!
Jeff
google picked up 4 dead links that were fixed as soon as I noticed them on the analytics page. In that time from I went from first page to fourth for major searches only to have it return to page one after the bad links were cleared from the analytics data.
For what it is worth.