How Long do You Wait

Link Request Time Frame

[graywolf]

After puting up a link on my site and sending the request out, if I didn't hear back in 2 weeks I would delete the link. I never heard from the people I deleted.

A few weeks ago I shortened the time frame to 1 week, since nobody ever got back to me after that. Within a few days I got requests back from some of the people I had deleted. I tried the experiment again this week and got similar results.

Anybody else have have this happen to them? How long do you wait before deleteing open requests?

[rogerd]

I think a couple of weeks and a polite followup are a decent approach. Many webmasters manage multiple sites and may not consider link requests a high priority. If I'm busy, I dump 'em into a folder for checking later.

If the resource is a good one, perhaps you should leave it up whether or not it's reciprocated.

[martinibuster]

Speaking as a person receiving a link request:
Pre-Linked link requests make me uncomfortable. It also raises red flags. I have never linked back because the quality I'm looking for is never there. Please note, I'm not attacking the quality of your site, I'm only stating my experience.

Speaking as a person making the link request:
My m.o. is to send a recip offer and wait to hear back. I don't have time to expend checking if hundreds of sites are linking back to me or not. From this perspective it's an issue of time that keeps me from holding someone's link hostage until they pay my return the favor.

Once someone has agreed to my offer, if after a week they haven't put it up, I'll send a gentle reminder. I'll exchange emails sometimes up to three times and consider their reasons- oftentimes the issue is that these are mom and pops and it costs them like fifty bucks to have their web person do updates, so they're waiting until they have enough updates to warrant the expenditure.

I'm ok with that and understand.