How to check validity of a link?

We recently exchanged over 30 links with a decent looking website; all seemed well but now I can never seem to find those links coming back to me. They are on the website but cant seem to find them on Google or using other software.

I think they may have used some coding to make the links useless.

Is there any way of checking this please as I want to make 100% sure before confronting them about it?

Many thanks

30 links from one website? And reciprocals? I really hope that they are at least all to different pages.

When you set up the link exchange, did they tell you which pages the links would be on? If not, then ask them.

You can easily tell whether or not the links are at least functional by looking at the underlying html code for the page. If you can't find the link there, or it's nofollowed, then they're trying to deceive you.

Don't trust automated tools based on search engines to find the links. It required that a) the search engines themselves have found the link, and b) that they're reporting it.

Hi

Yes all from one site; all from different pages; and yes I do know what I am doing.

My issue is I cant tell if they are worthless or not as they could have put something into the CSS.

Before each link they have added "id="SnippetList_ctl15_ctl00_LinkContent1_LinkContent"

I have no idea what this means.

All I want to know is if they are being deceiptful or are they being honest.

well you can't use CSS for links.

Likely this is a Google thing and not them.

Forget what's in the id attribute, it has no bearing on whether or not the link is useful. Does it have (just) your URL in the href attribute? Is there no nofollow in the rel attribute? Is the link visible both in the source code and on the rendered page?


==== afterthought ====

Also check that the linking page isn't blocked by robots.txt, and that there's no "nofollow" robots meta tag, and no "nofollow" X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.

Thanks for your help; it all looks OK then I suppose. The robots.txt says the following but I cant really figure out what is what?

User-agent: Slurp Disallow: /network/ Disallow: /planner/ Disallow: /member/ Disallow: /de/network/ Disallow: /kr/network/ Disallow: /jp/network/ Disallow: /fr/network/ Disallow: /cn/network/ Disallow: /it/network/ Disallow: /es/network/ Disallow: /tools/ Disallow: /map/ Disallow: /maplist/ Disallow: /robottrap/ Disallow: /robottrap/robottrap.asp Disallow: /error/ Disallow: /search/ Disallow: /searchinghotel/ Disallow: /application/ Disallow: /rates/ Disallow: /ratesapp/ Disallow: /newsletter/ Disallow: /*?ref= Disallow: /*?CFID= Disallow: /*?source= Disallow: /*.asp?affil_id= User-agent: * Disallow: /network/ Disallow: /planner/ Disallow: /member/ Disallow: /de/network/ Disallow: /kr/network/ Disallow: /jp/network/ Disallow: /fr/network/ Disallow: /cn/network/ Disallow: /it/network/ Disallow: /es/network/ Disallow: /tools/ Disallow: /map/ Disallow: /maplist/ Disallow: /robottrap/ Disallow: /robottrap/robottrap.asp Disallow: /error/ Disallow: /search/ Disallow: /searchinghotel/ Disallow: /application/ Disallow: /rates/ Disallow: /ratesapp/ Disallow: /newsletter/

What are the directory trees for your links?

If say /fr/network/the-page-your-link-is-on.html

Those are useless... pages are not crawled thus not indexed.