The simulations also allowed us to test how linker mixtures can be chosen to program the optical response of plasmonic gels to changes in their macroscopic strain state. Experiments on polymer-metal nanocomposites have produced qualitatively distinct polarizationdependent spectral changes due to stretching, but detailed information about how the mechano-optical properties reflect modifications to local arrangement of nanoparticles in real-space is lacking. Unlike for nanocomposites, the plasmonic nanoparticles of linked colloidal gels are themselves elements of the percolating network, which tightly couples their spatial organization to the macroscopic strain state of the material. Using our model linker gel, we study how this coupling leads to optical responses that reproduce the diverse trends observed in experiments and relate them to linker-templated structural modifications of the networks under uniaxial strain.