I have been testing a couple of WordPress plug-ins over the past few days. It is easy to get excited by the lofty claims made for these plug-ins by their creators. It is a bit disappointing when they aren’t really quite ready for prime time. Both of the plugs that I am looking at fall under this classification in my opinion. While I can see uses for each they don’t quite perform as claimed.

The Deep Link Engine is a plug-in that searches the web for related blog posts and inserts links to these posts at the bottom of your post. The download page states that you can choose which links to post but in practice this is not possible. I think that this is due to attempting to make it work with an auto-content plug-in that the developers have just released today. The plug-in appears to carry out a final search when the publish button is clicked and inserts the links that it finds at that time.

There are two advantages that this plug-in does give. There will be some direct traffic from the linked sites, and if they like what they see there would be a possibility of a better one way link in a future post. The WordPress software by default pings linked blogs and those blogs produce a trackback to your post. If the linked post is good the readers there may find their way back to your site. In any case Google is likely to note the link and this may help your page SERP.

The second plug that I have just discovered is an auto-blogging software. I put one instance of the plug-in up last evening and was able (by jumping through several hoops) to get it working. I have only looked at a couple of the articles produced so far. One had very little text to the post and that appeared to be somebodies affiliate text link with the link stripped out. The other article at which I looked had a little more content. The formatting on the articles was not too good, but I may be able to tweak that in the css file. The software pulls images, but does not produce a margin around the image so the text runs right up to the image.

The plug-in, WP-Article-Fetch, serves the articles from a server maintained by the developers of the plug. They admit that the articles are scrapped from the web. They have an article spin software on the server. The one article with content was not very human readable. I suspect that this is a shortcoming of their spin engine, but there is a lot of content that is written by non native English speakers that does not read so well either. If it is the spin engine one would have to rewrite the articles if you want a site to be proud of, but there would be some possible value if the main objective is just to attract traffic to expose to your ads. In fact people may click on an ad just to get out of there and go somewhere that makes sense.

I will continue to test these software packages to see if there can be significant value to either of them. Being free they are now worth the money spent.