I got an email today promoting a new program called Link Equalizer. It’s basically a way to get lots of links to your websites in a short amount of time. Membership isn’t cheap - currently $147 and going up to $197 soon.

Looking over how they describe how it functions, I can’t see that it would be any better than the Digital Point Co-op, of which I am a member and have had excellent results from, but the Co-op is free!

Let’s take a look at what they do:

1. You can choose your anchor text on either program.
2. Ads rotate across member sites on both.
3. Link Equalizer allows you to choose themed links, which the Co-op does not do - yet. That is planned for the future, however.
4. Link Equalizer ensures links aren’t reciprocal. Co-op does not check for that, but odds are that most of your links will not be reciprocal anyhow.
5. Co-op has something over 10,000 member sites, although I believe only 5000 or so are currently active. It’s growing rapidly. Link Equalizer doesn’t say how many are members now.
6. Co-op has strict policies ensuring that ads are not hidden. Webmasters have the choice of text ads or banners to place on their site. I assume the same for Link Equalizer, since they talk so much about the visitors you will get in addition to search engine rankings.
7. Co-op requires links on all pages of the site or directory of site you place in the Co-op. Links are validated regularly to ensure that if someone removes the links from their site they will not continue to benefit from the Co-op.

I could go on, but since I really don’t know if Link Equalizer has features that I am unaware of, I’ll leave off here. If anyone is using Link Equalizer and has a comment, please, say something. Until then, I am sticking with the Co-op. Why pay when I can get it for free?

It’s called Yahoo! Mindset. The basic idea is to let users decide if they are more interested in research or in shopping for something. Pretty neat concept and interesting implementation.

I did a search for television using Mindset. Once you’ve done your initial search, a bar appears allowing you to choose which way you want the results to go.

The initial results start out with the TV Guide website and the Emmys. Switch it over to research and the top sites are Wikipedia’s section on Television, the band from the 1970s and the NASA TV landing page.

Slide over to shopping and I get Lifetime Television’s website and the Fox Broadcasting website. Not exactly what I would expect for shopping.

The ads on top and down the right side don’t change, which is what I would expect - pretty hard to get companies to pay for ads for people who are declaring their interest is strictly research, not to mention it’s only Beta, so much too soon to ask advertisers to prefer one or the other.

It should be interesting to see how this one goes. It’s a great idea, since people who want to research don’t necessarily want online stores.