How do you keep track of all of your inbound and outbound links?

Getting overwhelmed with only about 30 sites--on the way to 100+

[brizad]

I'm running several sites in several different industries and I interlink them for PR as much as possible. My problem is that as I add more sites I need a good way to track how I have them all interlinked. Also I'd like to keep track of any links that I've paid for from out of my "network".

Ideally I'd like to be able to track any deep links and/or how many links I make from one site to another. This is not a necessity however.

I'm currently just drawing it all out on paper which works but is becoming unwieldy as I add more sites. Plus if you change something then you have to scribble things out which gets messy and hard to read. I've also drawn some diagrams with pagemaker which works OK but is sloppy as heck, because of my lack of skill with the program.

I'm tempted to just fill my office with whiteboards but I figure that there has to be a better way. Obviously I'm a very visually oriented person and so having this all in an XL chart doesn't really work for me.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[onlineleben]

For inbound links I take the stats from my logfiles (on a monthly basis) and put them into an MS Access database.
This gives me the possibility to see where I am getting links from and which links perform over a certain period of time (using crosstab query).

[surfin2u]

I keep most of my outbound links in a mysql database. This enables me to run a php script that attempts to retrieve the pages I link to from time to time, in order to identify bad links. I do have pages with outbound links that are not in my database, and for those I have code that parses those pages looking for outbound links and checks that they are valid.

I just ran my link check this past week after not having done it for a while. I found a number of bad links and wish that I had run that check sooner.

[brizad]

A DB is an idea that I hadn't thought of. I can see how it would be useful in certain ways as I add more sites. I'm not a programmer so what would you suggest I do?

I assume that Access is easier to learn than MySQL, however I also assume that MySQL is more standard and would that I would be better off learning it. I know that there is PHPadmin in Cpanel and I have played with it a bit. Would that pretty much allow me to set up a DB and get the information that I need, or do I need to learn the nitty-gritty of MySQL language?

--
Incidently, even though I think the DB idea would be great for keeping track of certain info, I don't think it would really help me keep track of what I was originally asking about--visualizing how all of my site interlink.

What I mean is, I'm building networks of related sites for traffic and PR.

For instance, it's becoming difficult for me to keep track that I have sites M-Z and sites G-N pointing to sites C-F which point to site A-B. And also that some but not all of sites M-Z also point to sites G-N.

Maybe I'm trying to do the impossible on a computer and I should just keep doing it on a piece of paper like I have been?

[surfin2u]

I'm sure that there's software already written for managing links. I'm not the best one to ask because I am a programmer and it's easier for me to write a program than to go find someone else's program that will do what I need. There must be someone lurking here, who can tell you about a package or two that will do what you need.