I’ve been reading a lot of bloggers lately hyping up this new link building service called Tynt. According to a quick Google Blog Search, 1,083 mentions of Tynt have come up over the last 7 days. It is also getting enough buzz across the innerwebs that a client was savvy enough to email me about it this morning.
Allegedly, Tynt is a cool service for bloggers and other creators of written web content. Tynt provides a piece of Javascript that creates a backlink to your blog post or site when your content is copied and pasted by a third party into a content editor.
Below is an example of Tynt at work. Thanks to Patrick Altoft of Branded3 for noticing that the Daily Mail in the UK uses it, and blogging about it on BlogStorm. He wrote a great post that helped alert me to Tynt. His post was also so good that I impulsively scrolled my mouse over his text, hit “CTRL + C” on my keyboard, and hit “CTRL + V” on this blog post.
Tynt At Work
Tynt Insight monitors copy and paste behavior on billions of page loads per month across hundreds of thousands of web sites . Our data shows that up to 6% of page loads results in a user copying content! On a site that has 20 million page views per month – cont
Source: Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt
My Reaction To Tynt
Wait a second… where’s the link?!?!
When Tynt works its magic, the title of Patrick’s blog post on BlogStorm (Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt) should have been hyperlinked directly to his post. After all, I directly copied and pasted his content into my Wordpress editor – no Jedi mind tricks here.
So… where’s the link?
The Problem With Tynt
Turns out Tynt’s Javascript code inserts the link to your blog post the second someone copies and pastes your information into a WYSIWYG text editor.
In contrast, I use an HTML editor to create my blog posts, rendering Tynt’s magic useless. Also, because of the way Tynt’s script works, their attributions are very easy to remove. A novice web plagiarizer can easily take them out of a post once they have copied and pasted your content.
Tynt is promoted as a “provider of SEO benefits by generating more links back to your content that are search engine visible.” Read more: http://www.tynt.com/#ixzz0XnNAbeTL
See – even when HTTP code is used for link placement, it is still ineffective.
Is Tynt worth adding to your site to be an assistant to your link building efforts? Sure. But will it actually produce a quantity of links for you? No.
I get that bloggers and news sites are tired of having sites steal their content, and I 100% agree with your gripes. As an alternative to using Tynt for building links when your content is stolen, I would personally recommend Wordpress users check out Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer Plugin.
After reading over Michael Gray’s testing with this plugin, the RSS Footer Plugin seems much more effective at putting content bandits to work for your link building efforts than Tynt.
Great info on Tynt. It looks interesting, but you’re right, a few of the essentials kind of slip through the cracks. I’ll have to check out the RSS footer plugin.
[Reply]
Jonathan, you raise a couple of interesting points. I’ve asked our team to take a look into what we can do to keep links active when pasting into HTML.
I think one important point is missed though. We really don’t think of Tynt as an anti-plagiarism tool. If someone wants to take your content, they will find a way. We try to help more with the ‘casual infringer’, this is the person who likes what they read in your blog, then copies some part of it and shares it via e-mail, Facebook, or some other channel. In the majority of these situations the links work very well. We track which ones get activated, and which ones are visible to search engines.
The SEO gain is much more clear for larger publications to be certain. For example, one daily newspaper we work with sees thousands of links activated and indexed every month, and in the last 30 days, those links have brought over 100,000 new visitors to the site.
We are continuing to build out the functionality of Tynt Insight and we welcome any suggestions on ways to improve what we are building for all content publishers!
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Statistically speaking, Tynt would work on a good scale because most bloggers don’t use any editors outside of TinyMCE and CK and most bloggers are running through writing more than SEO work while writing.
I can see this helping out a lot. You have 18-year olds blogging about Lindsay Lohan going to jail. Pretty sure I will get a backlink from; they aren’t using HTML editors or careful with their pageranks.
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