Aaron Nimicks has released an awesome new wordpress plugin called wpbankroll, which I will be installing on this blog on a trial basis. As alternative to directory links and for SEO purposes, wpbankroll represents a considerable advancement.

Directory links have a couple of problems.

1) Your link is often buried with tons of other links on the same page and has limited surrounding text. The search engines these days pay attention to the surrounding text using something called latent semantic indexing to determine the relative strength of a link. So a post on a high PR blog, (such as icooltools.com ) can have much more value than a mere directory link, or even hundreds of them.

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2) A blog post in a themed category is on topic, on theme and also usually will attract more readers, has the advantage of being pinged to various rss update services and countless other juicy benefits. Personally, my blog posts have captured -seemingly effortlessly so many awesome backlinks that I wonder why I bother with directories at all, but old habits die hard they say:)

The great thing for bloggers with this plugin is that they can make a little money allowing other site owners and bloggers to blog about there sites on the blog. So you can make a little hosting money, and also get on theme content.

WPbankroll comes with powerful configuration options that allow you to adjust featured listing prices, display links in the sidebar and many other options.

One feature I would like to see, but I don’t know how Aaron would do this is to enable a preapproval of the post before payment is processed. Personally, I would not automaticall approve anyone to post on my blog before i have seen what they are posting, no matter how much money they paid. I have yet to fully test this in the real world, but I will update this post once I have.

The installation of wpbankroll is very simple, the concept is simple and powerful and I am sure this plugin has a strong future.

The cost of wpbankroll is $49 for a single domain license, $125 for multiple domain or there is a free version (only requirement is that you maintain a backlink)

Another cool tool recommendation from icooltools.com