I recently upgraded a couple of Wordpress blogs to 2.61 and had an issue with aLinks. Well, two issues in fact. The first one was that it wasn’t linking keyphrases in pages – it was OK in posts but not pages for some reason. A colleague of mine came up with the cause and a workaround, but aLinks needs fixing by the developer. Until such a time…
The issue was with “captions” on photos. For some reason when adding a caption to a photo on a Wordpress page, aLinks didn’t link phrases. However, by double-spacing the words in the caption it mysteriously started working again. Odd.
The second issue was with the keyphrase grid in aLinks. It wouldn’t show the phrases, yet when I looked in the database, the phrases were there and in posts they were linking. By which stage I had duplicates (there’s a handy hint on this below) in my aLinks db. As it turned out, this appeared to be caused by apostrophe’s I’d used in the links and descriptions. I actually had to delete them in the database and re-add links minus the apostrophe’s and the grid started working.
Now, that hint for aLinks. Two hints in fact. Firstly, I’d take care using it for external links as this causes un-natural (to the human eye) looking links. By all means use a description on mouse-over like “Visit the website” or something (or use logical text like that as the keyphrase), but bear in mind if a Google chappie comes round, he/she may view links like this as spammy and manually apply a site penalty. No proof…it’s just common sense logic.
The second hint is to bear in mind you can add the same keyphrase more than once. If you want to link to a site or page twice in a post add something like ”Visit The Website” as a keyphrase twice (or more) in the aLinks grid and just insert the text more than once in your post.
Personally I prefer aLinks for internal linking to relevant articles, again using the “Description” to mouse-over a logical explanation for the user. On one blog I do use it for external links, but I edited the aLInks PHP code so that any external link shows in blue to make it obvious, while internal links (in this case) I left as orange. See www.packageholiday.com to see what I mean.
Lazy Man and Money Says:
November 1st, 2008 at 6:27 pm
I’m finding the caption problem that you are. I don’t know what you mean about double spacing, unless you mean putting two spaces before the keywords that will match. I can’t seem to get it working.
ExploreBangkok Says:
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:25 am
Hi Lazy Man -
The issue with captions is that if they appear in the same paragaph as the first time the keyword is mentioned, Alinks tries to tag the caption instead and renders the whole thing useless.
The solution is to put two spaces between words in the caption itself. Because of this, alinks will not recognize the caption as a keyword it needs to tag – and the caption itself displays fine.