Get More Pageviews With LinkWithin
If you’ve visited sites like Cracked, you’ve probably noticed the collection of recommended articles for when you are done reading the page you are on. Very likely, you’ve found these links to be extremely addictive, keeping you long on the site long after you’re done reading the article you came to the site for.
While WordPress has a slew of related posts plugins, the most popular of which is YARPP, they aren’t for everyone.
While these related posts plugins are great, they aren’t exactly the most visually appealing (at least not without a great deal of work) nor can they be used on other blogging platforms. LinkWithin, however, aims to make this process incredibly easy. In fact, the process doesn’t have any signups or advertisements to put up with. You simply enter your site’s information, paste a few lines of code and go.
But how well does it work? The answer really depends on the type of site you have and how you designed it but for many bloggers it will likely be a near-perfect solution.
How it Works
The fundamentals of LinkWithin are pretty straightforward. You simply visit their site, enter your blog’s information and, depending on your blog’s platform, you’ll either copy and paste a short embed code into your blog’s template or install a WordPress plugin.
Once you do that, LiinkWithin will start spidering your site and using an algorithm to find posts that are related to each other. The process can take several hours and, during that time, the recommendations likely won’t make much sense. In the case of my site, it took about four hours before the results were truly “good”.
Once that’s done, at the footer of each post (or wherever you place the code) you will see a series of recommendations for content similar to what is there. If possible, LinkWithin will include an image with each recommendation, pulled from the post itself.
If done correctly, it should look like this article on For the Love of Cooking. Attractive, neat and relatively well-targeted.
The Good
Though LinkWithin is far from a perfect system, there are many things it does very well. First and foremost, it is dead simple to use. Whether you are using the plugin or the embed code, it is pretty much a matter of selecting your options, uploading the code and forgetting about it.
When working, LinkWithin does a great job selecting relevant posts and thumbnails. Though it isn’t always perfect, its algorithm is at least as good as any related posts plugin I have seen and its image selection, for the most part, is very solid. Though you have to give it time to finish indexing your site, once it does you will probably be very pleased with the results.
Finally, it seems to work and achieve its goal of increasing pageviews. Having installed it on my site just a few days ago, making the results far too premature to be conclusive, I have already noticed an increase in the pages per visitor. The difference isn’t drastic, perhaps only about 10%, but it is still noticeable.
All in all, the system seems to work great, load fast and be dead simple to use. However, there are limitations that have to be weighed.
Limitations and Drawbacks
What LinkWithin gains in simplicity it does so by sacrificing features and customization. When setting up the script, you only really have two options, the first is how many recommended posts are displayed (3-5 specifically) and whether to use a light background or a dark one. Beyond that, you really don’t get a lot of say in image size, orientation, etc.
This means that there are a lot of things you can’t do with LinkWithin. For example, I’d like to either ignore or limit the linking to certain categories on my site, especially on my main articles, but there is no way to do that. Likewise, you can’t change the orientation or make any manual adjustments as the actual code for adding the links is pure JavaScript.
Furthermore, since it is pure JavaScript, not only are you putting much of your site in the hands of this third-party service, trusting that they will be reliable and quick, but it seems to cause problems with analytics applications and doesn’t allow the search engines to see the links.
Still, for those who want what LinkWithin offers, it is a very tempting service and likely one that you will at least want to try out.
Bottom Line
It’s important to remember what LinkWithin is: It is a simple way to add an attractive list of related posts to the bottom of your blog posts. It is that and nothing more.
It is not a sidebar widget, it is not a customizable solution, it is not Google fodder. It is simply a way to get you readers to click on more articles on your site.
It’s simple and it works. If you don’t need more than what it provides, have a blog that regularly uses images and don’t mind losing a little bit of control, you have nothing to lose by giving it a try. If you need more power, you’re better off with another solution.
If you do decide to go with YARPP, you may find this template particularly useful for mimicking LinkWithin using the plugin.
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Get More Pageviews With LinkWithin
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