Every webmaster knows that getting traffic to their web site is the number one problem they face. Without traffic you have no potential customers, and no customers means no money for you. It's that simple. So unless you have tapped an unusual source of traffic that has somehow fallen into your lap, you are generally faced with two possible options for getting that lifeblood traffic: you can buy it, or you can do what it takes to make the search engines love your site.

For most people, buying traffic is a dicey option. It is extremely difficult to buy traffic for less than the amount of income it brings in as sales. Accomplished pay per click marketers have figured out how to do this, but it always requires a significant investment in time and money - both of which you may not be able to afford for every web site you create.

The other option, is to make the search engines love your site to the extent that they rank your web pages highly in organic search results and send you tons of visitors. Once this happens, your traffic from that point on is cost free - provided you maintain your ranking.

So how do you make the search engines love you?

Backlinks from other web sites that are relevant to your own. And lots of them. That's the short answer. If the search engines think that other sites like you enough to add a link to your site, then the search engines will like you too, and reward you with better organic rankings.

Now, I am sure you have tried lots of ways to get backlinks to your sites, including article marketing, writing lenses on Squidoo and similar sites, and doing social bookmarking where you can. Those things work, eventually, but they require huge investments in your time. Wouldn't it be great if you were able to build a robot to do all this stuff for you?

Great? Are you kidding me. It would be amazing!

Well, a few people have tackled this exact problem and the general solution they have come up with is known as automated backlink generation. It's not as good as a real robot doing your bidding for you, but it's the next best thing. Surprisingly, very few people are using this kind of service to date, so it's a great time to get in on the ground floor, so to speak. I'll tell you why later.

The service I am going to review for you, and the one that I personally use, is known as NeuroLinker. It was created by a guy named Marc Ilgen, who has spent the last 25 years programming for companies that place a great deal of value on the computer science smarts of the people they employ. Marc has a Ph.D. in computer science and has, as he tells it, "developed software systems ranging from guidance and control systems for satellites to information management systems for US Intelligence agencies to games and entertainment software for cellphones." He has also spent time developing neural network algorithms in the context of information retrieval, which, no doubt, is the source of the name of his service, which he spent about a year developing before opening to the public in September of 2008.

So Marc strikes me as the sort of guy who isn't likely to put together a system that is going to fall apart at the seams when people really start using it in earnest. This is important, and bodes well for the future of the service.

Before you sign up with any backlink generation service it is a good idea to get some idea of the mechanics behind the operation so that you can know what to expect when you begin using the service. In this section I'll summarize briefly what goes on with NeuroLinker, and then cover this in more detail in my review (lower in the page).

Unlike some other backlink generation services, NeuroLinker gains its strength from something known as the network effect: the more people that use the system, the greater the value that the system provides to any one user. The disadvantage to network-effect dependent systems, of course, is that there is a startup time during which nobody is benefiting greatly because the size of the system is still small.

NeuroLinker works by creating backlinks, which it adds directly to the pages of domains that have been entered into the system.

In the original version of the system, which I'll discuss first, the backlinks you received would always come from other member sites that had been entered into the system. Thus, because your site is part of this system, whenever you add your domain mydomain.com to NeuroLinker you will be required to create a special page on mydomain.com where backlinks can be placed (by NeuroLinker) to other domains in the system: e.g. theirdomain.com

NeuroLinker will do all the hard work of figuring out which domains your site ought to link to, and automatically add those links to your special page. So you really don't have to think too hard about anything other than the keywords for which you would like your site to rank (a discussion of which we will get to later).

In return for accepting this collection of backlinks to be placed on your site, roughly the same number of other domains in the system will receive backlinks that point into your site. So it is a give and take arrangement.

There is one slight drawback to this arrangement - even though the links are one-way backlinks to your site, the domains are linked to each other, so it is possible for a search engine to connect the dots and possible decide not to credit you with page rank for those backlink. At present there is no evidence this takes place, but in principle it could.

To ensure that we don't put ALL our eggs in one basket, NeuroLinker now has a secondary backlink generation system which involves using WordPress blogs that people enter into the NeuroLinker system. These blogs, are also used to create one-way backlinks, but it is not possible to figure out which blogs have been entered into the system, so none of these backlinks could conceivably be discounted by search engines at a future date. In effect, this blogging system is a much cheaper version of the Linkvana backlink generation service. This new blogging component of NeuroLinker practically ensures that it will become the best backlinking service on the web.

How many backlinks you receive will depend on a number of factors. For one thing, the number will grow over time as the size of the network grows. Secondly, you can elect to receive backlinks that are only from sites that are "relevant" to your own (that is, if a person finds theirdomain.com of interest they may find your site to be of use to them too).

When relevancy is taken into account, the number of sites that might link to your own gets a lot smaller. Even so, in the case of the non-blogging component of the network, NeuroLinker will arrange to add backlinks to your site from roughly half of those related sites, and in return your site will link to the remaining domains in the group. Never do two domains link to one another, since would count as reciprocal linking (something the search engines discount).

Do you need to know how Marc figures out which sites will link to which? Of course not. And he's not going to tell you anyway. The only thing that should concern you is whether the whole business is properly implemented. Fortunately you are free to check which sites are linking to your site, and vice versa. Me, I am prepared to trust that Marc knows what he is doing. If he did not, you can be sure people would stop using the service when they spotted problems and NeuroLinker would come to a grinding halt.

Now that you have an idea about what NeuroLinker is all about, it is time to give you my full review. Or if you have peeked ahead and seen that I have given the system the thumbs up, here is the link to get started with NeuroLinker yourself.

I have given NeuroLinker a rating of 5.0 out of 5.0 stars. Earlier I had assigned a rating of 4.5, noting at the time that the system was relatively new, and would not reach its full potential until the size of the NeuroLinker network had grown beyond about 5,000 domains - at which point the collection of domains is likely to be relatively homogeneous and able to form relevancy clustering without any problem. Today, the number of domains in the system is around 4,000. Also, with the recent introduction of the Linkvana-like one-way blogging system into NeuroLinker, there is really no other competing backlink generation service that can match NeuroLinker, so I am happy to give it a 5 star rating.

This is truly is an excellent backlink generation service, which I think you will see for yourself by the time you have finished reading my review.

FIRST  THINGS  FIRST  -  CAN  NEUROLINKER  IMPROVE  SEARCH  ENGINE  RANKINGS?

Before I get into the details of how NeuroLinker works, I thought I'd show you some early results using the system, as proof that it actually works. Or seems to. I can't say that the following result is 100 percent due to using NeuroLinker, since I wrote 5 separate articles that I submitted to about a dozen article directories, including EzineArticles.com, but my sense is that this minimal article marketing effort would not have achieved the following result by itself.

On the other hand, I have repeated the success I am now about to tell you about with other domains for which I have performed no backlinking of any kind other that by using NeuroLinker. So you can regard the following results as typical for a site in the NeuroLinker system, provided you set things up correctly.

One of my other review sites is OptimizeMySiteReview.com which profiles Jeremy Palmer's PPC ad tracking software. My aim was to make my site rank for the primary keyphrase "optimize my site review" and the secondary phrase "optimize my site". At the time, these two phrases ranked my domain in Google at about positions 18 and 52, respectively. But within about 10 days of adding a SINGLE article to NeuroLinker, plus a DIGG entry and a Squidoo lens (both of which NeuroLinker members can do social bookmarking on), here's the result for my primary keyphrase:

	Proof That NeuroLinker Works

In the same period, my secondary keyphrase went from position 52 to position 8. Other things I did during this period were (a) shuffle the text in my page title to get my keywords to the front of the string, and (b) add H1 tags around my secondary keyphrase where it appeared high in the page.

Surely these on-page optimizations helped some, but I attribute the bulk of this page ranking improvement to the fact that NeuroLinker was building backlinks to my site and publishing versions of my single article to the network. I'll discuss how this all works later in my review.

Note that these results were obtained without using the added backlinks that can be generated using the new blogging network that has been introduced to NeuroLinker.

ADDING  A  DOMAIN  TO  THE  NEUROLINKER  NETWORK

The absolute first thing you'll want to know about is how easy it is to add a new domain to NeuroLinker. In this case there is nothing more illustrative than to look at the actual form used to do the job.

For the sake of clarity, I have reworded the the NeuroLinker instructions so as to keep the instructions brief (Marc tends to be somewhat wordy, so in practice everything is spelled out in great detail). I have also filled out the form as I might have done if I was entering this site as the domain.

One thing to note is that I have shown the form element for the first anchor text link that you might add. You are allowed another 19 (for a total of 20 per domain).


Hopefully the process of adding a new domain looks incredibly easy. Because it really is. The hardest part of the form above is probably the selection of anchor text alternatives. You might spend a couple of hours coming up with alternatives for this if you decide to create the maximum of 20 backlink variations.

As part of the domain specification process you will also be asked to paste into a textbox a collection of keywords that you think best describe your site. These are used by NeuroLinker to better characterize your web site so that "related" web sites in the system can be identified. You can create this list simply by visiting the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool and requesting suggested keywords for your own site.

The final thing you will have to do is specify a page on your domain that will be used to place backlinks to other domains in the system. Your backlinks will appear on the same page on other web sites. You will be asked for the name of a file that should exist in your document root, and which can be used to host the backlinks. For example, it might be called other-sites.php, and it will need to be a page that is linked to from within your site.


Although filling in the form for the Outgoing URL is simple enough, some webmasters may find the process of adding the outgoing page to their site a little tricky. NeuroLinker requires that the page you create specifically for the purpose of showing backlinks to other sites in the system be filled with the content that NeuroLinker provides. To do this, NeuroLinker provides you with some code to generate the content. If your page is generated by PHP, the code looks something like this:


The integer value that appears for the siteid variable is what NeuroLinker uses to identify your site within the network. It is assigned as soon as you fill out the Add New Domain form.

If your Outgoing URL page is generated by some other language you will use a corresponding piece of code. NeuroLinker has code snippets to cover all the possibilities. If your web page is generated dynamically from within a larger application, you may have to integrate this code into your application rather than simply add the code to a separate page on your site. This, in fact, is how I generate the Outgoing URL page (named /resources on the current site).

In order for a site to be accepted into NeuroLinker it needs to satify three requirements:

1. Each new site must pass the "acceptable quality" test, which means that it cannot be a site that any other NeuroLinker member would find offensive or spammy. Nor porn, pure gambling, and so on.
2. Each new site must be indexed by Google.
3. Each new site must have its Outgoing Links page implemented.

If these three conditions hold, the site will be accepted into the system. The last time I checked, sites were being added at the rate of about 1000 a month. Ideally, all members of NeuroLinker would like to see that number increase significantly. The more sites that are added, the better for everyone.

Backlinks are added at the rate of about 3 or 4 per day. Although I have requested links from relevant sites, most of the links I have received to date are not as relevant as I would have hoped for. But this will likely improve as the number and variety of sites in NeuroLinker increases.

Of course, not all sites that you enter into the system need to have backlinks from sites that are considered relevant to your own. For example, the NeuroLinker system itself is of interest to every webmaster regardless of their web site theme. So when I added this domain to NeuroLinker I did not try to restrict the backlinks to "relevant" domains. I was prepared to accept backlinks from anyone.

The good news is that the bulk of the sites I have added, even though they were PageRank 0 sites to start with, have acquired backlinks from sites with PageRank from 0 up to 4. Eventually all this linking is going to increase the PageRank of my sites. So, the sooner the process is started for a given domain, the better, since backlinks are added at a roughly constant rate.

It is worth pointing out that you can reject backlinks from other sites in the system if you do not feel the link is appropriate. I am not that picky about my backlinks, but it is good to know the option exists.

In late October 2008, NeuroLinker began offering a new feature: article marketing. Not only can you distribute backlinks to other domains in the NeuroLinker network, you can also distribute articles in much the same way.

The really great thing about this is that you do not have to worry about whether or not the article will get picked up by webmasters who frequent the pages of article directories. Articles submitted to NeuroLinker (they must also be approved) automatically get distributed. You can submit an article the one time and be done with it. Needless to say, this is a fantastic time saver.

Another nice feature associated with NeuroLinker article marketing is that the article itself can be written in such a way that each time the article appears on a new site it is slightly different than the last version of the article that was dished out. This is achieved by adding phrase variations to the article, and having NeuroLinker select from them randomly when it assembles the article. Your articles are not only distributed automatically, they are essentially unique articles.

I know that I will still be submitting articles to a few of the better known article directories. But there is now no reason for me to bother with any of the dozens of second-tier article directories that litter the landscape, each with their own rules for submission.

With NeuroLinker you have complete control over the article and the placement of links within them. Well, you can only add links that go back to your site, so that is a minor restriction. But you are allowed up to 3 backlinks in the article body, and another 2 links in the resource section. That ought to be plenty for most article marketers.

This is a new component of NeuroLinker which I have not used yet. But I can tell you how it works. You create a WordPress blog which you enter into the NeuroLink system in a manner very similar to entering in your main domain. Then you submit posts not to your blog, but to NeuroLinker, which will parse your blog entry and post it not only to your own blog (you provide NeuroLinker with a special author username and password to do this) but also to many other blogs in the system. This can work well because NeuroLinker uses a blog post spinner to make each of the posts unique when added to different blogs in the system.

If you know anything about backlinking systems, then this procedure should sound familiar to you. It is basically the same algorithm for generating one-way backlinks that is used by the competing Linkvana service, which is about five times more expensive.

This single component of NeuroLinker makes it WELL worth the investment.

Another NeuroLinker feature that appeared at the same time article marketing was introduced is collaborative bookmarking. This is an entirely optional form of back scratching that has its advantages and disadvantages.

Everyone knows that having backlinks to your site appear on the top social gathering web sites is beneficial to your page rank. Backlinks from high PR sites like Squidoo, Digg, Furl, and so on are like gold. Marc Ilgen's idea is that members of the NeuroLinker community spend some time bookmarking the pages of the sites of others in the system.

The way this works is that you are presented with a list of web sites that you have the option of bookmarking on your own time. For each bookmarked site you get a NeuroLinker brownie point in the system. The more points you earn, the more often your own NeuroLinker web sites are shown to other members in the community, so the more likely it is that they woll spend time bookmarking your sites.

In practice it is a slow endeavor. I had to spend a couple of very tedious hours bookmarking to earn myself 50 points in the hope that this would be enough to get noticed by others and earn my sites some valuable bookmarking currency. On the other hand it gave me a chance to see what kinds of sites make up the NeuroLinker network.

Only time will tell if this bookmarking investment pays off. At present it is not possible to see to what degree others have bookmarked your sites. I imagine this will change in the near future. Otherwise one's incentive to spend time bookmarking for others is likely to vanish pretty quickly.

It should be apparent at this stage that I am impressed with Marc Ilgen's NeuroLinker. As a means for automated backlink generation it certainly works incredibly well, and can only get better as the size of the network grows. But there are some features that I would love to see implemented.

Currently when you visit your NeuroLinker admin panel and pull up the list of domains that backlink to one of your sites, you get extra information, like the anchor text used in the link. This is handy information.

Even more useful would be the ability to pull up a list of just the anchor text string, or keywords, that appear in backlinks to a given domain. Along with each of the keywords, it would be great to see a small graph showing the position of the domain in Google's organic search results for that keyword (perhaps sampled on a weekly basis).

Presumably this domain position would increase over time as the number of instances of the keyword in the system increased (as more domains are added that backlink to your site with that keyword). In other words, for domains for which the only form of marketing is through the NeuroLinker service, you would be able to see at a glance just how effective NeuroLinker is at pushing your domain higher in the search engines.

I have suggested this feature to Marc, and he seemed to like the idea, so there is a good chance that it will appear in a future version of the service. In the meantime though, it is my opinion that NeuroLinker represents the state of the art in backlink generation services today.

If you are still wondering whether it is worth your time and money to subscribe to the NeuroLinker service then I want to make the decision just a little easier for you.

If you go ahead now and order NeuroLinker, using this link or any other on this page, I'll throw in the following two products of mine, free of charge:

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