Aug 28, 2012

LinkWithin Review - Most Popular Related Content Engine


LinkWithin is operated by a small team based in United States, New York City, which had been stated in the LinkWithin’s contact page.


When it come the topic of Related Content Engine in sites or Related Posts Plugin for blogs, the first name that will sure be coming up in the majority’s mind must be LinkWithin. Linkwithin.com is currently ranked 299 globally and 577 in U.S by Alexa (as at 28 August 2012). According to Alexa, there were with approximately 44% of visits consist of only one page view, with the visitors view an average of 2.4 unique pages per day.  

LinkWithin is totally free, and is the simplest as well as the easiest to use among all Related Content Engines. What you have to do is just to simply providing your Email and your Blog Link, together with the selection of your Platform in used (eg: Blogger, WordPress (self-hosted), Type Pad, Other), as well as your desired Width of stories to be shown (eg: 3 stories, 4 stories, 5 stories). Yet, LinkWithin wills generating a widget for you to insert into your blog directly. It is really fast for LinkWithin to get into functioning (approximately 5 Minutes after installed).

Overall, the respond time of the LinkWithin’s widget is relatively short, and you need no to worry about your sites might be getting slower after added it to be a part of your sites. LinkWithin claimed that the selections of the stories are based on several factors, including titles, tags and contents. The related stories will be shown under the posts by default in thumbnail images form, or in links form, if majority of the related stories retuned are without images attached in the posts.

There is with No Ads and No Signups needed. In fact, you have no way to sign up for any account with LinkWithin currently. Although it sounds like really simple and easy, but you might have much lesser opportunities to enjoy several services as provided by other Related Content Engines.

LinkWithin provides supports via it support page only. They offer no official forum or community resources. The FAQ page is with only two line codes provided for customization, which include,

  •  Placement of LinkWithin - <div class=”linkwithin_div”></div> 
  • Text of LinkWithin - <script>linkwithin_text=’Your custom text:’</script>  

Besides, one of the key services that are currently not provided by LinkWithin, is the ability to display ads or other sponsored contents. The lack of the ability to show monetized contents is impacting negatively to the LinkWithin’s competitiveness. As stated in the LinkWithin’s FAQ, they are planning to introduce revenue-sharing features in the future. However, as long as we see no login panel and the account registration page in LinkWithin’s website, we should expect the ‘future’ as stated in the LinkWithin’s FAQ might not be near as expected.

Also, if you are concerning about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you will be probably worrying about LinkWithin might be eating up your site’s Internal Link Juice. Link Juice in general is the prime determinate for Search Engines such as Google Search.  After installed LinkWithin, you will probably discovering that your site’s referring URLs or Sites are full with LinkWithin URLs (eg: widget3.linkwithin.com, widget4.linkwithin.com, etc). This however shown that LinkWithin is actually directing your viewers to their site first, before they redirect them back into the actual url in which the viewer desired article is located with. So, I would say that, as LinkWithin provides you with free service, they are expecting you to feed them with your Link Juice as the return. 

As the conclusion, if you do not might to share your internal Link Juice and expect no sharing of ads’ revenue, you might probably enjoy to use LinkWithin. In addition, if you want a Related Content Engine to be set up in just a click or two and you are lazy to play around with customization, LinkWithin will definitely be the best choice for you. Also, LinkWithin ‘likes’ Blogger the most, as it will be really simple to add LinkWithin into a blog hosted by Blogger platform.   



   


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