Most link exchange tools are a public directory you browse. This one isn't, and that was the hardest call in building it.
A crawlable list of sites openly looking for links connects every member to every other one. That's the pattern search engines look for when they're deciding whether a group of sites has been trading links to manipulate rankings. Building it in the open would have handed me free SEO and quietly put every member in a visible cluster.
So the entire member area sits behind a login. No public member list, no feed of who swapped with whom, no domains visible to anyone not signed in. It costs me the organic traffic most directories live on.
The other decision: every site has to prove it owns the domain by uploading a text file to its root, same idea as Search Console. That came from doing swaps manually and repeatedly finding the person I'd agreed with had no way to actually publish a link.
