LinkWithin is a popular widget that not only displays links to your related blog posts at the bottom of a blog entry, but also includes thumbnail images pulled from those posts. The images make the links more enticing than plain text ever could. As a result LinkWithin has become popular among bloggers who use lots of images, particularly food bloggers.
The problem? The creators of LinkWithin seem to have moved to a shack in Montana that is completely off the grid or they just don’t care about answering support emails. Their widget is not without flaws, the biggest one being that if you change the domain name of your blog you’ll start seeing duplicate links—one for the old address and one for the new. It appears that the creators of LinkWithin manage a database or index of these links that users don’t have access to, so there’s no way to remove the duplicates. I’ve emailed them multiple times over the course of a year on behalf of several clients and not once have I received a response or even an acknowledgement that they received my email.
That’s why I’ve stopped using LinkWithin and now recommend that my clients use the nRelate Related Content widget instead. nRelate offers all the same features as LinkWithin but offers you much more control over the widget, including:
- Thumbnail image size
- Several different display options that have different borders, shadows, title palcement etc.
- Editable widget title
- Number of posts to display
- How many years of archives you’d like to pull for links
- Maximum title length
- What pages the links should appear on
- Several other options
There’s also a sidebar widget available and advertising options. If you create an account with nRelate you can access tracking stats that let you know how many people have been clicking on your links. The best part is that if you have a question their support staff actually answer you and help.
You can download the nRelate WordPress plugin here and visit their web site to grab code for Blogger or other platforms.
January 12th at 4:55 pm
Funny – the lack of responsiveness is *exactly* why I dropped LinkWithin on one of my blogs a couple of weeks ago. I also switched to nRelate, and I think I’m at the point where I’m ready to switch the other site as well. The one thing I still need to do is take the time to figure out the best way to show text links on the mobile theme and thumbnails on the regular one.
January 21st at 4:00 am
I started few months ago with nrelate but now i am wondering to change because nrelate loading time takes almost 50% of the page load time. Except this I am happy of the service, but speed is key, have you heard about an alternative which is faster ?
February 14th at 7:58 am
This is a good one
I like it
March 1st at 9:29 pm
Great tip! Just installed nrelate on my blog, and I’m liking it much more than Linkwithin. Thanks!
March 21st at 5:06 pm
Thank you for this! I’m going to nrelate now to download for Blogger!
June 1st at 11:20 pm
Are you *BLEEPED* kidding me?! There’s NOTHING for implementing this on Blogger. Are you a kid? Cutting and pasting directions when you don’t know how to use the script?
June 2nd at 10:43 am
@Antonia – I’ve installed this on Blogger. If you go to this page there’s a big orange Blogger button that you can click to start the process.
June 5th at 8:37 am
thanks! im gonna try this one on my blog…
July 14th at 1:20 am
There is also OutBrain (https://www.outbrain.com/getwidget) but nRelate seem to be the best, features-wise.
August 16th at 7:42 am
Yep, just ran into this issue. Moved site from WP to Tumblr and back to WP. No way to adjust or edit LinkWithin. Half of the links point back to the old Tumblr structure. Ridiculous. Definitely moving to nRelate…
August 16th at 7:29 pm
For those who need adjustable widget – consider graddit.com related posts widget. It’s not just possible to have your own css, but also you can specify related posts manually (or rely on automatic mode based on labels). It requires ratings widget to be set up though. More details: http://fruitfulbookmarks-en.blogspot.com/2012/06/related-posts-widget-update.html
November 10th at 8:42 am
Well this is good to know. They indexed our image titles which were poo and I can’t get them to answer my emails. My husband is a software engineer and he couldn’t believe they would build the widget that way. Looks like we’ll be looking into this as a replacement. Thanks for the tip.
December 25th at 12:09 pm
Hi Jennette
Like you said before it’s showing duplicate links on my blog ever since I changed my domain name.
Anyways, nrelate seems to be a good alternative for it. Gonna try it now. Thanks for sharing about it.
April 17th at 8:42 am
How did you uninstall LinkWithin? I’ve gone through all my code and don’t see it but it still appears on post pages after nRelate. I’ve emailed them but no response yet.
April 17th at 12:53 pm
@CANDI – The LinkWithin people don’t respond to emails, so you won’t get help there. If you’re using Blogger the LinkWithin stuff is sometimes managed in a Gadget on the Layout page. If it’s not there, it was probably inserted directly into your template.