These tools will manage your directory of reciprocal links and make sure that other websites continue to link to you. If they detect that one of your partners has removed their link to your site, the software can be set to automatically email the webmaster of the site and even stop linking to them if that fails to get the desired result. You will also get an add url or submit site form so that other webmasters can submit their sites details for approval. Various criteria can be set to determine what sites will be accepted, or you can approve sites yourself if you prefer.

LinkMachine

The flexibility of this product is truly impressive. Everything can be configured to your exact specifications meaning you are almost unlimited in the way you use it, how you want the directory pages to look, and how much gets automated. Only the main features are mentioned on the website, but if you install the free trial version you can see it all first hand. No other product beats this one on features, and I think I know why: The owners welcome feedback and suggestions. Have a look at the version history and you'll see that there have been regular updates and improvements since the initial release. Email support is excellent, which is very unusual, but it's this close relationship with their customers that keeps LinkMachine at the top of it's class.

Other features: Instantly exchange links with other LinkMachine users, monitor your rankings in the search engines, find new partners in a variety of ways, spider partner sites to find missing links, search for contact e-mail address automatically and much much more.

Requirements: Any web server with PHP version 4 or later.
See my Example LinkMachine Directory

AutoLinksPro
Link Exchange Manager
Apply Link Exchange
LinkAutomate
Linking101's Script

For best results, you have to hunt for good quality sites that are willing to exchange links with you.

Arelis

This application has been around for a long time and has some useful features. It's a well respected solution for finding link partners, but sadly it's reputation for managing directory pages is not as good. For many people this is their preferred research tool, but then they export the data for use elsewhere.

Zeus

Another popular product. If left on the default settings you can end up with lots of cookie-cutter pages that look exactly the same as everyone elses. This is bad for a number of reasons that I'll not go into here, so lets just say if you plan to use this software make sure your pages are highly customized. If you have the skills, it's best to export the data and use other software to make the HTML. Used properly this is a powerful tool that will track down many good sites.

PR Prowler

PR Prowler can very quickly find huge numbers of high quality websites that may be interested in exchanging links with you. What makes this product great is the information it finds out about each site: Pagerank, outbound links, backlinks, email address and most importantly an estimate of the page rank boost your site is likely to receive. You can filter sites in a variety of ways so that only the best ones are displayed, and then contact them all at once, or just a selected few.

SEOElite

This clever array of tools goes way beyond the scope of this page, so I'll not write a full review. It is well worth a look as it performs many of the tasks described above, but the variety of features makes it difficult to compare to the other products.