quick guide to efficiently verifying that directories are linking to you
 

This is just a useful tool to help out some newbies, when I discovered this it saved me a lot of time and aggravation and helped me to plug some wasted PR bleeding.

Okay so, let's say you have some blogs and you go around adding them to a ton of different blog directories. A day or two later you get some emails back saying your blog was added and you get all psyched and you don't really notice that you only ever ended up getting 6 emails but you added your site to 8 blog directories. This is common, at least in my experience. BUT it can happen another way too. Sometimes you get an email, BUT THEY DID NOT REALLY LINK TO YOU! Or, their link to you magically disappears after a while, even though you still have your reciprocal link to them up!

Once I started realizing this, I started a system of TAKING NOTES when I added sites to directories, so I knew which directories I submitted a blog to, and on what dates. As I received the confirmation emails, I would manually check that I could see their link to me, then I would cross them off the list. After a week from the date I added, I would re-submit to any of the directories that still had not emailed and/or linked to me. After this second try, if they had still not linked to me, I took down their link and removed them from my list of blog directories.

Now, I used to literally go to their site and try to find my blog. Some of the directories have a search function, which made this relatively easy. Some do not, which made it a pain in the dick. Enter, google site search!

http://www.google.com/sitesearch/ Type in the directory's url in the left box, then type in your site's name or URL in the right box, and search. Behold! In about 10 seconds you can verify whether they have a link to you or not. Now I do this periodically, if a site seems to be getting less traffic than it should or has lower PR than I expect or anything out of the ordinary, I check all my links on the site to directories. I can go through the whole list in about 5-10 mins and any sites that have fucked me, get deleted. Stop wasting your time and PR with directories that aren't even maintaining a fucking link to you. If you have 5 links up to sites that don't have links up to you, you are wasting precious PR for NO RETURN BENEFIT. You are giving away traffic and PR for NO TRAFFIC and NO PR.

I hope this helps some people.

Thanks for the helpful information. I was just wondering if a directory still had my link up and I didn't want to look through all the pages.

yeah, especially since twan's stuff is all getting buggier and buggier i think it's not maintained anymore so it's not reliable..