By now, many advanced SEOs will have heard about Tynt, a script that lets websites with good content build links automatically. A new competitor to Tynt has just been created, and it’s self-hosted. I’m getting ahead of myself though… For those who don’t know what Tynt is, let me quote from Tynt’s site.
“Our patent pending Tynt Insight technology tracks what’s being copied off your site and automatically adds a link back to your content with every paste.”
Read more: http://www.tynt.com/#ixzz0YfhD8AgN
I didn’t create that link – Tynt did. Whenever you copy off Tynt’s site, and paste the resulting content elsewhere, that new content has a link added to it. So if your content is worth quoting, you get links.
I just got an email from Brett Barros, a student at MIT, who’s coded up a self-hosted competitor to Tynt. When he told me about his Link Building Pro, I wasn’t too impressed, since I knew about Tynt. But there are some pretty important differences. As Brett puts it:
“There are a few key differences from Tynt.
1. Most importantly for SEO, my script makes use of the meta keyword [tag] for the link text. [It pulls one of the page’s keywords from the meta keywords tag and uses it as anchor text.]
2. Second most importantly for SEO, it automatically adds focused links into the text from elsewhere on the page. Thus, the paragraph itself is embedded with *added* links.
3. It is 40% smaller in file size. You can also merge the javascript into other javascript files, reducing the total files the user needs to load (speed optimization will be important with the Google Caffeine update).
4. If Tynt’s servers go down, and you use Tynt, your site will have problems. With my script, you host it yourself [so there’s no worries about other people’s server reliability].
5. You can specify areas of the page where the script won’t activate (like in code blocks).”
Also, while I can’t seem to find Tynt’s pricing on their site, Brett’s offering his tool as a free download. How can you quibble with free?