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Usually web based, all the work is done on someone else's server and someone else looks after it all. That's less work for you - no complicated software installations and upgrades, no uploading pages and if something goes wrong it's someone else's problem. So what's the catch? Well, not being in control means you can't usually decide how your own link pages look. You are sometimes even limited in who you can exchange links with. If you like to be in control this is obviously a problem, but the other disadvantage is that some of these services can get you into trouble with the search engines, who occasionally take offense at cookie-cutter links pages lacking original content and existing purely to inflate your sites link popularity. Here's the golden rule: If you use any of these services, make sure you customize your pages as much as possible.
The advantage of 3-way links is that, to the search engines, they are effectively one-way links, which are generally considered to be of higher value. If you want to stay search engine safe, then you will definitely like this one. They have put a huge amount of work into making the links pages footprint free, which means they are all different and there is nothing to connect them to a link exchange service. Links are spread slowly, which is more natural, and the quality of sites in the network is much higher than average.
Installation is very quick and easy, then everything is automated. You never have to think about it again! I could say more, but it's all explained on their website so you may as well read it there. Highly recommended.
The long established leader. LinksManager allows any webmaster to submit their site for your approval, checks for missing links and automatically updates your links pages. The big advantage of this service is that it will work on any website. As all the software is on a remote server there are no compatibility issues. Advanced users may want a little more flexibility (see the software page), but for the average user this has all the most important features and none of the headaches.
Following in the footsteps of LinksManager, but it still has some catching up to do.
Quick and easy to use, but extremely limited. You choose some categories then select members to partner with and everything's done automatically. There's an example on this site and although every effort has been made to customize it, you can see that the pages look almost identical to those of other users. The other big disadvantage is that only members can participate. You could use GotLinks in addition to another service, but it's not powerful enough to be a complete solution.
My example pages have been completely customized and look quite nice, but most members are not so careful. Partners are automatically allocated and this is part is completely inflexible. It's not advanced enough to be a complete solution, but could be used in addition to something more powerful.
An exciting new idea that is taking the web by storm. However many sites you link to, twice that number will link back to you! For example, if you put five links on a page of your site that has a pagerank of 3, then ten other sites will link back to you from pages with a pagerank of 3 or higher. This is a very easy way to get a lot of top quality links. Try it and see for yourself.
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