Say good-bye to Headzoo aLinks autolinker plugin. It was a great tool and did an excellent job of automatically hyperlinking defined keywords within wordpress but with the new wordpress versions, it stopped working and appears to no longer be maintained. The headzoo.com site itself is no longer online. I wish the owner well and hope they are ok. Meanwhile, after extensive research I have found a suitable replacement.
By extensive research, I mean exactly that. I spend the better part of a day searching for a wordpress plugin that would autolink keywords for my new Health Article Directory that I’m running on wordpress. I use that site to promote herbal remedies, for more information on that, read my post “How to Make Money in the Multi-Billion Dollar Herbal Remedies Niche“.
Anyway, I download, installed and uninstalled plugin after plugin until finally finding the one that did exactly what I wanted.
Cross-linker is a plugin which allows you to set-up words which are automatically hyperlinked to desired URLs and doesn’t bog the server down and dynamically hyperlinks instead of hyperlinking existing posts only which a lot of what I found did. This means I could add the product names as keywords and those would automatically be autolinked to the url I set in the Cross-linker admin area on all future posts as well as existing ones. Talk about saving time!
Some additional benefits I found was the ability to select html tags or special characters which is actually a feature headzoo alinks didn’t have. With this feature you can have Cross-linker ignore bolded or italicized words, you can have it ignore headline tags. It also allows you to drop code in the page which will have it ignore all text within that section.
Full importing, backing up and exported are supported functions as they were with Headzoo aLinks and you can switch autolinking on or off for your wordpress comments section plus many other useful functions.
So even though I will miss the headzoo alinks plugin, I am very happy with Cross-linker and I’m sure you will be too. It is absolutely free though donations are accepted so if you are looking for a wordpress plugin that will autolink keywords I highly recommend it.
If you’re unsure about how to install plugins, it’s pretty easy. Here are the instructions (I’m running WordPress Version 2.7.1 so your mileage may vary)
In your wordpress admin…
Click “Plugins”
Scroll down to “Get More Plugins”
Click “Plugin Browser/Installer”
Search for “Cross-linker”
Click “install”
That’s it.
You will find the Cross-linker admin & configuration link in the “Tools” section of your WordPress admin.
Happy Keyword Autolinking!
Thanks, Gail, great post! I got a little confused around the ‘how to count the cloaked links’ section but I think that was more due to the time (3am) than anything else. I have tried your methods again this morning though and they work perfectly.
I’m using it on an unindexed landing page, driving traffic via PPC, and promoting a clickbank product. So far so good…
Glad you were able to get it going! Your problem with understanding probably had less to do with it being 3am when you were reading and more to do with it being 3am when I wrote it.
Hi Gail,
I tried your cloak link for clickbank, and it worked perfectly on the first time. the same cloak link can be used for commission junction as well?. I looked at your cloak link generator, not sure I understood it well, to give it a try.
thanks for your help Gail.
Warm regrds
Charles.
Hi Charles,
Glad you were able to use the clickbank code easily. I don’t use CJ much and haven’t tried to see if I could cloak the links. For the misc items I do promote, I use my own url shrinker. You can see it at https://wahguide.com/url , you are free to use that one if you like or you can install the script and use on your own site. You can download it at https://wahguide.com/freebies/url-shortner.zip , I also put a link to it in the freebies section. It’s easy to install and the readme file is included. If you have any problems with it, just let me know. On a side note, I think it would not be difficult to do Ebay links and I’ll look at that sometime soon.
Take care,
Gail
Hi Gail,
Thank you so much for the reply. the url shrinker seems attractive. No Gail I did not use it yet, though just tested it. Just saw your reply, thought I will say thanks. will catch up with you once I try it out. Thanks again Gail.
Warm Regards
Charles.
hi nice post pretty useful I got this to work, although it would be nice to know how to also include .html extension on the end instead of just http://yoursite.com/amz/B0011ZCDKS. I’m sure this can be all done in .htaccess file just not sure I’m a little bit of a green horn lol!
Hi Sheldon,
It’s no problem to add the .html to the end.
Replace
RewriteRule ^(.*)
with
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html
Then your link would look like
http://yoursite.com/amz/B0011ZCDKS.html
This works with clickbank as well. And you can change the html to any file extension you want. It is basically just ignored anyway.
hi,dear
thanks for useful tips you let me to know more about .htaccess.
how i can indexing my newly created sites using .htaccess in search engines like google?
thanks alot for article.
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Excellent post! I’ve switched over one of my dynamic websites to a static .html website and was looking for a more efficient way to cloak my Amazon links since I couldn’t use the features of plugins.
Thanks for sharing!
Amazon Links idea great. I’m going to try it with my Amazon affiliate sites. thank you.