Custom Reciprocals ?
 

After a few years off the business i decided to turn back and focus on submitting free sites. I have been reading the board for a couple of weeks now and i am quite familiar with the basics and the rules of free site submitting. I used to build avs sites in the past so it should not be much different i guess. However i intent to be 100% compliant with the rules so I have lots of questions to be asked and to make sure everything is ok before starting my submissions...

Long sentence short, i am wondering if its ok to create custom reciprocals. I started collection recip links from LL's and put them in a table but the overall picture looks like, well... shit.
Some has 50*50 banner while the other has 300*300 and it just doesnt look nice.
What i want to use is text links like :

SITE NAME
niche name

I know thats ok since i saw this kind of recips in many sites but i want to make sure that its 100% OK ?

Any tips for creating custom text recips or anything i should avoid ?

a search for "custom recips" should give you many threads on this subject.
Short answer is most LL's prefer you to use their own recips, but will accept custom recips as long as you use the same anchor text as they use in theirs and your custom recip looks decent.

Yup, Majick's pretty much got it. Use the same text as the LL's recip, if there's a "title" tag in the link leave the title tag, but as long as you're doing custom recips for everyone most of us don't mind.

I eat up custom recip's like a fat guy on cheesecake. In other words I love them!

|santa|

I'm with the Preacher on this one (NEVER thought I'd hear those words outta my mouth!) :D

I prefer custom recips as it's much easier to create a tight clean recip table. When I do free sites myself, I always use custom recips and have zero problems getting my sites accepted. The other upside is you can get a few more recips on the page and still keep it looking goooood :)

With ours I've designed them as part text banner and part image and generally require webmasters to use them without modifications. However, I know some webmasters only use text links (as you outlined) and that is something we allow as long as it has the two links...one to our homepage and one to the actual category your site is submitted to. We've also recently added a pay feature (one time fee) for any submissions that don't wish to use a recip at all...