Automatic Links

Why should I use Automatic Links?

Some links should exist in every post that mentions a topic: the glossary entry for a technical term, the product page for a product name, the cornerstone guide for a key topic, or the affiliate link for a tool you recommend. Adding these links by hand takes time, and keeping them up to date across hundreds of posts is almost impossible.

With Automatic Links you write the rule once, for example the keyword “WordPress hosting” pointing to your hosting guide, and the plugin does the rest, including on posts you publish in the future. When a URL changes, an affiliate program moves to a new network, or a product is discontinued, you edit or delete one rule instead of searching and editing every post.

Because the links are added dynamically and not hardcoded in your posts, your content stays exactly as you wrote it. If you deactivate the plugin or exclude a post, its automatic links disappear.

Keyword to URL rules

Each rule connects a keyword to a target URL. The target can be a page of your site or an external website, so the same feature works for internal linking, affiliate links, and references to partners or sources. For each rule you can also configure the link attributes, for example to mark affiliate and sponsored links.

Targeting by post type, category, tag, and target group

A rule can apply to all your content or only to selected post types, categories, and tags. For more complex cases, a target group combines several conditions, such as “posts in the News category” or “posts with the Review tag”, and can be reused by many rules.

Rule categories

You can organize your rules into categories, for example “Glossary”, “Product links”, or “Affiliate links”. These categories only help you manage a large number of rules, and they are not related to the categories of your posts.

Limits per post and per URL

Too many links in the same post look unnatural to readers and search engines. Link Manager applies three limits at the same time:

• A limit per rule, which sets how many times a single keyword can be linked in a post
• A general limit per post, either a fixed number or a dynamic number based on the content length
• A limit per target URL, which stops different rules from linking the same URL too many times in a post

All three limits are configurable, so you can adapt them to your content.

Priority

When several rules match the same post and the limits do not allow all of them, priority decides which rules are applied first. Rules with a higher priority value are applied first. With random prioritization enabled, the default setting, rules that share the same priority are applied in a different order on each post, so links are distributed more evenly across your rules.

Precise keyword matching

Advanced matching options let you decide exactly which occurrences are linked:

• Case sensitive search, to link “Apple” the brand without linking “apple” the fruit
• Left and right boundaries, to avoid matching a keyword inside a longer word, such as “cat” inside “category”
• Keyword before and keyword after, to link a keyword only when it is preceded or followed by specific text

Protected elements

You can protect specific HTML tags, such as headings, and specific editor blocks, such as buttons or tables, including custom blocks from other plugins. Protected areas never receive automatic links.

Self-link prevention

A rule is never applied on the page it points to, so a post never links to itself.

Test mode

Test mode shows automatic links only to the users who can manage rules, so you can check new rules on the live site before visitors see them.

Per-post control

The Automatic Links panel in the post editor lets you disable automatic links on a single post, for example on a legal page.

Bulk creation and click tracking

Link Manager also includes two tools that work with your rules. With Bulk Operations you can create many rules at once from a spreadsheet-style editor, and with Click Tracking you can see how many clicks each automatic link receives.

How to use Automatic Links

1. Open Link Manager > Auto Link Rules and click Add New.
2. Enter the keyword and the target URL. Optionally set the link attributes and the post types, categories, or tags where the rule applies.
3. Save the rule and open a post that contains the keyword to see the link. Enable test mode first if you want to check the result before visitors see it.
4. Check the Dashboard to see how many automatic links each post receives.