Link a Dink - better than Alinks
by Sapphire (May 26, 2008)
I love Alinks and all its cool functions for making phrases on my site automatically turn into links, but one thing about it was driving me crazy:
It spits a huge block of code into your source, between the bot and your content. Go check your source code, if you use it. See that? See how far down your content starts? I don’t know why more people don’t realize this matters for SEO. I see a lot of templates and Wordpress themes that are supposedly SEO-friendly which also put dozens of lines of code between the bots and your content. This is basic SEO, people: your content needs to be as close to the top of the source page as you can get it. This issue has since been fixed! Thanks Sean!
I searched for a lighter solution and found it: Link A Dink. Now, Link A Dink won’t build your Amazon links for you. It’s basically a sophisticated version of search and replace: you pick a phrase, then you type in the precise code, including the link code, you want to replace it. You can also use Javascript, which is pretty cool, as long as you strip any returns out of the code - Alinks doesn’t work with Javascript. But Alinks did require your users to have Javascript, while Link A Dink doesn’t. And finally, Link a Dink doesn’t generate tables and bloat your database. Lots of advantages here.
Posted in Blogging, Tools
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June 4th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Hey Sapphire! I was looking for a good alternative to alinks, You’ll be happy to know I found you via google, 4th rank for “getting alinks to work”. I never could get alinks to work for me at all, so I’m going to go try link a dink right now. Thanks for the infos! Btw…I really like your blog. Not only is the design rock solid and pretty, but you put a good feel to this place. I’ll be back =)
June 5th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Glad it worked for you!
July 6th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Hi Sapphire,
I released aLinks v2.0 a couple days ago. I wasn’t aware of the “block of code” problem in previous versions (then again, I haven’t had much time to answer forum/comment questions), but it’s defiantly not there in this version.
Some other things to note: The plugin has always supported JavaScript (if I understand what you mean) via it’s “Custom HTML/JavaScript to add to links” setting, and it still does in the new version.
I’m also not sure what you mean by “Alinks did require your users to have Javascript”, since it doesn’t require that your visitors are using JS. The admin area requires JS, but so does much of the WP admin area these days.
July 6th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
That’s good to hear, Sean!
Re: the javascript. Some affiliate links are pure java code, and I didn’t see a way to make those work via the keywords admin page. I’m not sure what the feature is that you’re talking about - would that cover what I mean, or are you talking about wrapping links in, say, a bit of tracking code?
July 7th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Hi Sapphire,
I see what you mean now. The JS feature I was referring to allows you to add, for instance: onclick=”somecode()” to each link. I didn’t even know about the pure JS affiliates. Oh well.
July 7th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Sean, it’s still a great plugin that does a whole lot of stuff others like Link A Dink do not. I just happen not to need that other stuff, so Link A Dink was a great find. Glad to hear you’re still working on it - I may very well need it again sometime!
July 10th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Hi Sapphire, thanks for the feedback, and for taking the time to chat with me. I realize that aLinks is overkill for 80% of the people out there (and maybe even a little confusing with the whole module deal). One of these days I might get around to creating an aLinks Lite. But eh, I’m pretty lazy.
August 13th, 2008 at 7:52 am
[...] are CPM. So I’m going to try monetizing products mentioned on it via Amazon again, now that Sean has fixed whatever was causing Alinks to dump all that code above the content on my source pages. I still [...]