Today we’re going to do a quick product review. For a couple of weeks now we have been using a product called Neurolinker, which is an online service that facilitates link sharing among its members. There are other similar services but we were attracted to this one because of the positive comments we read regarding the developer’s support and its price, which is very reasonable at less than $30 per month.
To use Neurolinker, you place a snippet of code (in either PHP or .NET) on the page on your web site that you want to contain your outbound links to other Neurolinker members. Basically, you are setting up a link swap page, only rather than manually set up reciprocal links, the script does it for you. In a day or two after installing the script, you will see quite a few links pointing to other web sites. The beauty of the system is that other members running the script on their web sites will also be linking back to you.
You can configure the links to be highly related to your web site or light on relevance. To start out, I used the more loose configuration. You have access to reports that show exactly what sites are linking to you, which is a very nice feature. I found that there were quite a few sites linking to our sites that were highly relevant, but also quite a few that were highly unrelated. We are now testing the system with the tighter configuration.
The system also has a social bookmarking feature. This is a really cool feature…IF people are doing it. It relies on the honor system, so it does not provide the kind of visibility you get with the swapped links. Basically, you bookmark the web sites of other members, earning “brownie points” as you do. The more points you accumulate, the higher your sites will appear on the list of sites to bookmark for other members. So the more you bookmark others’ sites, the more your site will be bookmarked.
We will have a much better idea if Neurolinker is worth using in a few more weeks, but so far it looks very promising.