Link Whisper WordPress Plugin Review – Is It Worth It?

If you’ve spent any time researching affiliate marketing or SEO tactics online, you’ve no doubt stumbled upon the website Niche Pursuits. It’s run by Spencer Haws, an accomplished affiliate marketer with dozens of successful affiliate marketing websites. However, Spencer doesn’t spend all his time affiliate marketing – he also creates tools to make life easier for affiliate marketers.

By far his most popular affiliate marketing tool has been Long Tail Pro, one of the most popular keyword research tools in the world. Just this summer, though, Spencer released a new tool he claims will change the way bloggers and affiliate marketers manage their internal linking. This new tool is called Link Whisper, and we just couldn’t help but try it.

We’ve put Link Whisper to the test to see if it delivers on what it promises. Here’s our full review.

What Is Link Whisper?

You’ve heard enough about its legendary creator and huge potential, but now it’s time to get down to the facts: what is Link Whisper, exactly? The answer is simple enough. Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin that helps you manage and add internal links to your site.

The function may sound basic, and some people may wonder why internal linking is so important. The truth is that internal linking is incredibly important for SEO. If you want to get your site ranking better in organic search results, you’re going to need an effective internal linking strategy that not only adds importance to each page, but lets Google know your site is well-constructed and organized.

It might sound self-explanatory, but it also should be mentioned that more organic search traffic equates to more affiliate link clicks, and more money for you. Plus, you’re adding a ton of value to each article, which makes the experience better for your readers as well.

How Much Does Link Whisper Cost?

Cost is often the first thing that comes to mind when considering a new plugin or tool for WordPress. With so many different tools claiming to be essential for different things, it can be hard to reconcile yet another plugin purchase, and they certainly can add up quickly.

Fortunately, Link Whisper is not very expensive, at least compared to many other plugins out there. You’ll pay $67 per year for a single site, $97 for three sites, and $147 for ten sites. That boils down to $5.58, $8.08, and $12.15 per month, respectively. All things considered, the cost isn’t bad at all. Of course, if you’ve got more than one site, it’s a no-brainer to go with at least their three site plan, as you immediately save a lot of money.

All in all, Link Whisper doesn’t charge very much compared to other plugins in the industry. That being said, it also doesn’t have a wide range of complex features, and you’re really only purchasing it to do a single job: manage internal links.

Link Whisper Features

Link Whisper comes across as a simple plugin because that’s exactly what it is. Though there aren’t a ton of features, we’re going to go over all of them here and test just how well these features get the job done.

Add Suggested Links to Pages With a Few Clicks

When you first open up the Link Whisper dashboard in WordPress, you’ll be met with a fairly basic list of your current articles and pages, as well as how many inbound internal, outbound internal, and outbound external links there are on each of these pages.

The presentation might seem a little bland, but don’t let that put you off. This dashboard is a very useful tool to identify where you could improve your articles by adding a few links here and there. The main feature in the dashboard, other than the link statistics, is that you can select an article and then embed that article within other similar articles on your site without even having to leave the Link Whisper dashboard.

This is how the feature works. In your dashboard, find an article you want to appear in more places on your site, then click “Add”. Here, we’ll be using a sample article about hiking to Broken Top, a mountain in Oregon.

Click “Add” and you’ll be taken to this screen, complete with suggestions for other places on your site where you can add this link:

Essentially, what Link Whisper is doing here is crawling through all the other articles on your site to find text that matches the title of the article you’ve selected. As is to be expected with an automatic identification software like this, not all of the link suggestions are going to be accurate. However, in this case, two of them were.

To sum it up, that’s how this feature works! You can also do this from the bottom of each article as you’re posting it, which we’ll talk about next. But from the dashboard, this is pretty much what you can do.

Suggestions and Linking Tools on Blog Posts

Using the linking feature in the dashboard is great, and it allows you to take articles you’d like to feature more and embed them in articles all across your site. Let’s say that instead, however, you’d like to add more outbound internal links to an article. Here’s how to do it.

To add outbound links to an article, just navigate to any post on your site. From there, scroll to the bottom of the post, and you’ll see a similar display to the one above. Link Whisper scans through the articles on your site and matches them up with the topic and text of the article you’re viewing. You can then see whether or not it’s made a good match, and you can add links from there.

In this particular example here, neither of the suggested links made sense to include. It’s important to mention that, because it’s one of the flaws of Link Whisper: you’ll get a lot of link suggestions that don’t make sense. However, this kind of flaw is to be expected with this type of plugin, so it’s not that big of a problem.

And with that, we’ve covered all the real features of Link Whisper! It might seem like a small list, but that’s because Link Whisper is a very simple plugin that accomplishes a few basic tasks that make life a lot easier if you’re looking to improve on-site SEO.

Helpful Uses for Link Whisper

There are a number of uses for Link Whisper that should make it an attractive plugin for affiliate marketers, because internal linking is extremely important for a well-built website. Here are the main benefits of using Link Whisper.

Boost Organic Search Rankings

The main thing that internal linking is used and emphasized for is on-site SEO. The reason internal links are so important for SEO is that more links on a page can help show search engine crawler bots that your site is legitimate and that you’ve built a solid framework of content.

You don’t necessarily want to overdo it with the internal links at least for the sake of not bombarding your readers with unnecessary content, but adding a few internal links to each article can dramatically boost your organic search rankings and bring more traffic to your site. This, above all else, is likely the most important and helpful use of Link Whisper.

Save A Ton of Time

It goes without saying that Link Whisper allows you to save a ton of time that can be spent doing more rewarding things for your site. This is a huge plus, as going back through old posts and adding links is incredibly time-consuming. If you have a lot of content that needs to be updated with links, Link Whisper can quite literally shave dozens of hours off your workload with just a few clicks.

If you’re an affiliate marketer looking to save some time, Link Whisper is a great option for you to consider.

Provide Value to Readers

Somewhat of an added benefit of using Link Whisper, adding internal links to your articles can provide value to your readers. As long as you don’t get excessively spammy or repetitive with your internal linking, a few links in each article will not only encourage readers to check out more of your site, but those links will provide the readers with valuable content they may not have stumbled across otherwise. It’s a win-win!

Link Whisper Alternatives

Though Link Whisper is somewhat original in what it attempts to do, there are most definitely other plugins out there that can accomplish similar tasks for affiliate marketers, some at a lower cost.

Internal Link Building and Internal Links Manager are but a few of the popular, free WordPress plugins available to find certain keywords within your content and embed links within those keywords. It’s worth noting, though, that these aren’t quite as handy as Link Whisper. You can embed links from within the plugins, but you still have to decide on certain keywords that you want to add links to, and decide which link you want to be applied to those keywords.

Link Whisper does all of the work for you by finding keywords in your articles as well as determining which articles on your site are best fit to embed within those keywords. In total, although there are free link manager plugins out there, they don’t offer quite the same utility and functionality that Link Whisper does.

The wildly popular Yoast plugin also suggests internal linking where possible, but is more expensive than Link Whisper and does not operate in the exact same manner.

Is Link Whisper Worth The Money?

Our verdict on Link Whisper is this: Link Whisper is a time-saving, bare-bones plugin that allows affiliate marketers to save time and improve their search engine optimization at the same time. It comes in at a relatively low price point, and if you’re looking for a comprehensive internal link building plugin, this is the one.

This wouldn’t be a complete review if we didn’t note a few of the negatives with using internal link building plugins; for one, you could end up with a lot of repetitive, spammy internal links with the exact same anchor text, so watch for that as you use this plugin. Additionally, post plugins can sometimes hurt your site speed, which actually does hurt your SEO. These are minor considerations to take into account, but they’re worth noting before you decide on an internal link management plugin.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Saves a lot of time
• Extremely easy to use
• Comes up with link suggestions
• Displays the total number of internal and external links for each article

Cons

• Unappealing, basic user interface
• Could be more complex
• Could be better at suggesting proper linking opportunities