Two days ago I came across a plugin for WordPress called “Deep Link Engine“. The owner claims that with this plugin you will increase traffic to any website. How it does it, what I read, was that when you post an article on your site, it automatically searches the content to acquire the best tags. Now from those tags you will get a list of relevant blog url’s. If you choose those relevant blog url’s, they will automatically be uploaded to your site as “relevant blog articles”, which in turn sends out a ping to all those urls that you have link to their site in the hopes that they will link back to your site. Now doesn’t that sound like the answer to it all? Sure it does!
From my first experience using Deep Link Engine was how easy it was to install and actually use it. I installed it on my Beachfront Jobs website since it gets quite a lot of action but like always never enough. I’ve owned Beachfront Jobs for several years now and all I have is 10 relevant articles on it! Can you tell I’m not the ideal blogger? None the less I followed the process of setting up Deep Link Engine on my already published 10 articles. Final result was that I had between 10 to 25 relevant blog urls displayed on each post.
Maybe it’s the way the plugin works but with all those pings that are supposed to be pinging, I received a return comment on one of the articles! At this point I’m excited. One comment after 10 minutes, well maybe we’re onto something! So I installed on 3 of my other websites and was hoping for the same result but no luck, nada.
Now don’t get me wrong here I’m not putting Deep Link Engine down, I just reporting to you my experience up to now. Isn’t this a review or what? It’s only been 2 days since implementation of the plugin so lets give it a chance. Usually I like to test a new plugin for at least 30 days. So we’ll give it some time still.
One of the things I noticed right away was the fact that all the page ranks of the relevant blog urls that are automatically returned from the tag search all have a 0 for rank.
Maybe it’s me but if I have a page rank of example 4, then what would be the advantage of linking to a website with a ranking of 0?
Another thing is that how could adding 10 to 20 “relevant blog” urls to every post on your site be good for page rank? Isn’t it better to have the least out going links on a website?
Only time will tell us. So for now I’ll keep the Deep Link Engine plugin active for the balance of the 30 days and I will report the final results.
If you’re interested in trying out Deep Link Engine, you can download it for FREE right Here. In return I would ask you to comment on your findings so my readers can share a different prospective on the matter.
Daniel D. Roy
Well, it brought me here with your related blog link. It sounds cool – if nothing else then maybe it would help me find relevant blogs to comment on even if they didn’t link back to me. Finding relevant blogs can be hard on some niches, so I’m going to see if this will work for me – will let you know!
Thanks Sebastyne, I’ll look forward to your thoughts.
I gave the Engine a try, uploading it yesterday to my four Websites.
I feel more critical than congratulatory — I’m sure glad I never bought it.
What I truly hate is that if one’s site is monetized with advertising, then the Engine uses lots of tags that have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic of the blog. It will populate the tags for pingback search with things like ‘Amazon’ and ‘Clickbank’ and so on.
If you have ‘adsense’ or related advertising, then it will also apply tags related to whatever the featured products are. These ads often supply products for advertising that the site owner is mystified to tie in as being even remotely related to the blog subject.
Yet the Deep Link Engine will apply those advertised product tags into its list for pingback searching. In fact, it is so zealous about it, I sometimes have felt that it was being lazy about finding tags that actually were related to the subject of my blog, so few are offered.
So I always have to rebuild the tags list. It’s easier to delete everything than just select what I don’t want because the Engine has a habit of deleting the entire population of tags anyway, even if I only try to delete one tag.
I also hate to the extreme that when a long list of potential blog sites is presented following the Engine’s tag searches, the user is forced to start deleting the false blogs. I have lost count of how many times I will have selected a site to delete from the list, only to have the entire list disappear — just as it does with the tags for its pingback search.
And no, I do not inadvertently select everything in the list for deletion. This mass deletion Engine miscue is rather commonplace.
I’ve found that once something like this happens, the Engine will not retrieve the sites if the search ‘refresh’ option is selected. It seems that once they’re gone, they’re gone.
Believe me, that is extremely irritating, because there are often some good candidates in the populated list along with the garbage and irrelevant blogs.
I’m finding that I am spending a great deal of time trying to tweak the Engine. And I’ve had those instances where — due to it deleting all of the sites from its populated list when I only selected one site for deletion — I am left with absolutely nothing to add to my blog as being blogs of related interest to any reader.
Yes, I know that the programme is free, in case anyone should feel going to the bother of pointing that out.
I am simply cautioning anyone with a well-monetized site that he or she is going to have considerable issues getting very much benefit from the tool.
I wish that it was possible to just copy the good, relevant sites that the Engine comes up with; save them; and then if the Engine does delete everything, have the facility to insert them manually into one’s blog. But I haven’t figured out how this might be done.
One thing more.
If ever you need to edit your blog — say, you find a spelling error you want to correct, for instance — then beware the Deep Link Engine! It will repopulate its list of blog sites. Anything you have already listed on your blog as a relate post will be replaced, and quite often the new content it has come up with will not include what you’ve already found yourself happy with.
It’s impossible to edit your blog without Deep Link Engine doing this.
This is yet a further reason that I wish I could figure out how to manually supply links to the “Related Posts” area.
All I can say to this is I agree with everything GarnetHGB has to say. The tag list is beyond irrelevant, every post I’ve written includes the tag “http” for example. RELEVANCE has NOTHING to do with this tool. It’s a pain to use, and if you’re not careful, it sends ping backs to blogs you really didn’t intend to link to, and you get grateful email from people writing some obscure blogs about who knows what being happy that you found their blog useful and you’re forced to explain you linked to them by accident!
In addition it makes the blog editing page excruciatingly slow, while it repopulates lists and tags you don’t want. It’s a total thumbs down for me and the plugin is going to the bin.
I also got terrifically bummed out at one point and deleted the darn thing from one of my sites, Sebastyne. However, I’ve been patiently working with it and found that although it is extremely laborious to use, the plugin can be made to work.
BUT…I wouldn’t want to have to be doing it with too many sites — I couldn’t, in truth! It’s far too much work doing so!
I’ve learned how to delete sections of the Deep Link Engine code from the edit area of my blog once its done its ‘work,’ in order to limit the number of blog sites it’s trying to impose — IF there are fewer relevant sites found than I would have liked the Engine to provide.
Similarly, I have learned how to replace relevant site code to overwrite the crap it has pasted onto my blog post.
But doing this successfully requires deactivating the plugin once it has found its version of relevant blogs.
Otherwise, it will simply impose whatever the Hell it feels like as soon as you update your post, and you’ll be right back where you were — a list of nonsense sites touted as being relevant to your blog post.
As I said, it’s truly labour-intensive, and totally impractical if you are working with more than a handful of sites.
And as you’ve pointed out, it probably sends pings to those unfortunate blogs I will be going to separate from my own, once I replace those sites’ data during the Deep Link Engine editing I am forced to do in order to list the true relevant blogs.
The only workaround would be to not even activate the plugin. You’d need to familiarize yourself with the coding format, and then ‘build’ your own Deep Link Engine formula with all of the correct links you want that you may have found through some other means — perhaps Zemanta.
But I’m not quite that industrious! I prefer to let Deep Link Engine find its mish-mash, and then select what I want from the dross.
Alas,I don’t know how it affects sites that have been unfortunately pinged before I’ve overwritten their URLs in the Engine — does my ping remain embedded with them even after I remove their URLs? And do they understand that I’ve done that, falsely linking to them?
I don’t know enough about the process to say. And that bothers me — I’m not trying or intending to deceive them, if that’s what in effect I’m doing.
I’ll have to agree with you GarnetHGB, the plugin has potential if you’re familiar with recoding. Since this blog is really about helping the aspiring entrepreneur to avoid the pitfalls when building , maintaining and monetizing their new websites. This is especially true with anybody who has absolutely no technical experience or training whatsoever. Call me lazy but after spending 4 years at 16 hours a day self educating myself about websites, coding, marketing, anything that can speed up the process, well then I’m in. Sharing my discoveries with readers is what it’s all about. The satisfaction of knowing that with my help I saved someone 20 hours off their work! So as per my own findings on Deep Link Engine, well I won’t recommend the plugin to anyone just starting off. Unless you have the time to tweak or at that point creating a new model, it’s not worth the trouble. Especially with their recent update. Imagine, me the author or Deep Link Review Part 2, has a link to a relevant blog which in fact was to another website, which by the way I don’t own, to find a copy of the same article taken without permission! That’s another subject altogether. Read the conclusion of Deep Link Engine Review which should be posted sometime this weekend.
Cheers,
Dan
Wondering about the conclusion to this….I haven’t used it yet and it seems like allot of hype but no real value. Every month they claim the “launch” of their masterplan. When you download the plugin they have allot of lead capture for them but no instructions on how to use it. You have used it since March so I’m wondering did it work like the hype said it would?