I have had this happen with link exchange a few times now. I am starting a small niche directory and warnings like this are of interest to me as I plan promoting my site soon, "pctec" sorry to hear you are having this problem.
the only way for link exchange is to remove the link also, lol, but the juice is already given, i have experienced this, and see that my link was removed, but then the only way i thought is removed also his link without informing him. lolz
You guys may want to look into www.LinkSnitch.com. My buddy developed it and its a fantastic tool for managing and organizing your links - including PAID links. It a great little system that automatically checks for your link on sites on a daily basis, checks to see if your link attribute changes (they add nofollow), checks to see if they are cloaking their page (and thus your link), provides email notifications of link changes, organize and manage your links by domain or link types (eg: one-way, recipricol, paid, 3 way, directory links, sponsored links, deep links etc - over 20 types) and a few other cool features. They do have a free basic full version to try. good luck.
Half of the post in this thread add no value to the op problem, Who ever reported me is a loser. Facts are facts, The way nebs get treated in "your" forums and That there are thieves on the internet will never change. Careful where you spend your money and keep a log.
actually, to throw in an argument for the other side of the coin, sometimes, it cld just be a pure mistake by the owner in mixing up paid links and removing the wrong one. Had that happen to me before, a simple apology was all it took to resolve it. So give the guy a chance and sometimes, it does not hurt to give others the benefit of the doubt first.... wld surely create a much more harmonious society
Unfortunately DP has changed drastically since I started in 2004. This place is full of thieves now. Watch your back.
i still like to believe that there are many honest folks out there. While that does not mean I am not careful with my dealings, but I do try to show some form of faith when dealing with others, and more often than not, that same faith is reciprocated. Idealist? perhaps, but i think it sure makes life better than giving everyone a suspicious eye.....
There are a lot of honest people here and great friends I've made, don't get me wrong. I just don't like the freeloaders who lurk and take (take only).
I think to stick with the more well known members of the forums for exchanges is about as safe as you can be and yes of course keep track of all link trades and check regularly
I received a response from the dir owner... Of course the site was sold to someone who promised to keep the paid links... He did offer to put my link in another dir however. At least there is some progress here. edit: My new listing is now up. What I honestly do not understand is why someone even sells a directory only to buy another one. Why not simply promote the one you have and make it stronger. I guess I'm just old fashioned and believe you should stick with it, whatever it may be...
Thanks The Pheonix, I am the coder for Link Snitch. I wrote this program just for this reason. I have been buying and selling links for years and about half of them never go full term unmolested. I hacked together an alpha version for one of my directory owner buddies and he has been loving it since day one. He found about 20% of the links not what he agreed on them to be. Some of them appear fine in his browser but not when viewed by a bot very similar to Google's bot. He swears the program saves him about 2 hours a day, because he has over 400 links in the system and he use to check most of them daily by hand. Please try the system - the basic is free and fully functional. If there are any features that would add value to the system, just let me know and I'll add it.
sorry to say, i've not really tried many of these types of programs, but how does yours compare with the free ones offered by others and even the paid one offered by mystikmedia?
Never saw the one from mystikmedia, will have to look that up. Most get the urls from what is indexed in the search engines, you directly insert the watched urls in this system either manually or via bulk upload. (coming soon.. you can use the search engine to cherry pick links for import) You don't have to run anything on your system for this to verify, find and notify you of missing/bad/altered links (I hate windows apps you have to keep running to verify links). It randomly hits the tracked url with different signatures from different IPs to keep the site from cloaking (ip delivering) something to your monitoring service. I have found that most of the free services do a very poor job at actually verifying the link is real (an actual a href to your site), if it is nofollowed, and if it being cloaked. I did basic research before writing the program, but maybe a service very similar to mine exists. But then again, how many niches only have 1 product to choose from. I will just have to make sure mine is the best (which I believe it is). And if a user requests a feature, I normally add it within a few hours if it see mutual benefit in it.
always write down links you have bought in a spreadsheet, like excel. then check back every few weeks.
I keep a very detailed list of all my links... both "purchased reviews" and "sold reviews". But that doesn't stop people from deleting them, or selling their directory and having the new owner delete...
sorry to hear that. Again, we need to address the importance of site owner, who runs and who you can trust. Now, if this is by another DP directory owner, it is very sad thing.
Bad thing is they are both DP Members. Find It Fred buyer/seller have been tossing the ball to each other. I dont know about this new one if they will honor mine. To sum it up. Link Buyers is in losing side.