Review of Reciprocal Manager Link Management Software
A website that people can't find in the search engines is a lot like a car without any gas.
Getting inbound links to your website is critical to ranking in the search engines. Reciprocal linking is the
most popular way to get links to your website.
The problem is that managing a reciprocal link campaign can be quite painful and time consuming, so you need help
from a script like Reciprocal Manager.
Reciprocal Manager is a reciprocal link directory management script that has been around for quite some time.
Using Reciprocal Manager on your site makes it easy to trade links with other sites.
Important note: Most of the Reciprocal Manager reviews and forum posts on the net are old and out of date. On
September 25, 2005, Kevin Ocasio released Reciprocal Manager 3.30 in unencrypted form. What this means is that the
code is no longer encrypted to keep people from reading it, and the special unencryption routine is no longer needed
to run Reciprocal Manager.
Since updating to the unencrypted version most of the bugs reported have gone away and
the script runs lightning fast. If you are currently running Reciprocal Manager, I strongly recommend you upgrade to
the unencrypted version. If you are looking for a script to manage your reciprocal links, Reciprocal Manager 3.30 in
unencrypted form is worth a serious look.
Now for the bad news. If you installed Reciprocal Manager 4.0, development on that version has been abandoned. Apparently
the programmer hired by Kevin for the new 4.0 version was not so great. Kevin does plan to release a feature to allow you
to transfer your links data from Reciprocal Manager 4.0 back to Reciprocal Manager 3.3.
Reciprocal Manager Overview
The main features of Reciprocal Manager are:
- Relatively easy installation, assuming you have experience creating a MySQL database and uploading files to your
webserver.
- Provides an add your link form on your website so other webmasters can link to your site and submit their
link for your review.
- Allows you to customize the add a link form so you can tell people you link acceptance criteria up front.
- When a webmaster adds a link to your link submission form, the reciprocal link is automatically checked, this checking
includes options to check for javascript links, which search engines don't count and to insure there is a path from the
home page to the links page so your link passes PageRank™. These are time consuming checks when done manually.
- The Sister Sites feature allows a webmaster to exchange links with several of your sites from one form.
This saves your link partners time and gets you links for multiple sites at one time.
- Creates static html links pages that are search engine friendly and organized by category.
- Allows you to provide a template so your links pages look like the rest of your site.
- Allows you to create categories and sub-categories in your link directory, so links go on pages relevant to the
target site.
- The add a link page has a really cool auto form fill feature which allows other users of Reciprocal Manager
version 3.x to retrieve their link information to fill your form.
- Checks for duplicate link submissions to avoid link spam by over aggressive webmasters.
- Allows you to easily change your link text on the add a link form, so you get different link text over time.
- Provides automatic reciprocal link checking and notifies you if a partner removes your link from their site.
- A backup and restore reciprocal link directory feature is provided in case you need to move your site to a new
web host.
- Sends e-mail to you when new link requests arrive and sends email to partners when link exchanges are
approved or declined, so you don't waste time checking whether you have requests pending.
- Allows You to customize the e-mails sent to link partners so your e-mail is more personal and your link exchange
requests get attention.
Reciprocal Manager Strenghts
- If you have multiple sites, or plan to create multiple sites over time, Reciprocal Manager is a great deal, since
you pay once and use it on as many sites as you want, but the sites have to be your sites. Like any commercial software,
you cannot just give Reciprocal Manager away to others.
- When searching for some phrases found on the Reciprocal Manager link form, over 13,000 results are returned,
so it is used on many sites across the internet. With all those sites out there, many people are familiar
with the link submission form and are more willing to input their link information.
- Because Reciprocal Manager is well known and established, many people search specifically for Reciprocal Manager
link forms to find link partners, so once your site shows PR and is in the top 1000 of the search engines, you start getting reciprocal
link requests.
- Reciprocal Manager is easy to get started with, you can get it setup and start exchanging links in an evening, then later explore
advanced features like changing the site templates.
- Reciprocal Manager is a PHP/MySQL script, so it runs on any Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) web server
(that is most web hosts).
- When you buy Reciprocal Manager, you get free upgrades for life.
Reciprocal Manager Weaknesses
- Installation can be intimidating for people unfamiliar with creating a MySQL database and uploading files to a web
server. The installation instructions are poorly written, so here are
Reciprocal Manager Installation Instructions that you may find
easier to follow.
- The admin panel could be better organized, for example the links to different admin pages don't match the
title of the pages and not all options are where you would expect. This is not bad once you get familiar with it,
just takes a bit to figure out where things are at first.
- The templating of the links pages is powerful, but somewhat hard to figure out the first time. For a really simple
example, you can download the template used on this site here (it's a ZIP file,
use right mouse, save as to download).
Read more about how Reciprocal Manager can increase your sites search
engine ranking.
For more information:
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