The internal linking engine that shows every score

Published posts and pages are indexed. Free indexes post and page only. Custom post types and custom field indexing are Upcoming in Core+ Links Pro.

Per item, the index stores title, excerpt, headings, cleaned body text, taxonomy terms, slug, published date, parent/child relationship, and inbound and outbound internal link counts.

Excluded by default: drafts, private content, password-protected content, trash, auto-drafts, revisions, menus, and attachments. Everything is stored in your own database tables. Nothing is transmitted.

Configure what gets indexed in the context bank.

The context bank controls what is eligible as a link target. Exclusions are total: an excluded page is neither suggested nor counted toward orphan and underlinked reports. Without this control, legal and utility pages would remain permanently on both lists. Suggested exclusions for utility pages are proposals you review — nothing is auto-excluded.

How exclusions and taxonomies work.

Define a keyword and the page it should point to. Scan published posts and pages, review the matches, and apply the ones you want — one at a time or as a selected batch. Core Plus Links creates a WordPress revision when it writes. Nothing is applied until you confirm.

Each keyword rule shows how many pages it has linked, with a click-through to those pages in Change history. Turning a rule off does not remove links it already inserted — undo those from Change history. Scheduled or unattended apply is not part of Free — that is Upcoming in Pro.

How Auto-linking works.

Change history lists every link Core Plus Links has inserted — filterable by origin, type, status, run, rule, and source page, and sortable. Undo a single change, a whole run, or every link from one keyword rule. The confirm shows how many links across how many pages you are about to reverse. Undone entries show when they were undone.

A post edited since the link was added is flagged for you to fix by hand. The plugin never silently overwrites later edits.

How Change history and undo work.

Two site-wide path lists — Only auto-link these pages and Never auto-link these pages — control which source pages bulk apply may write. Leave the only-list empty to allow every page. A * matches any part of a path, for example /blog/*. Never-list matches win.

Matching is deterministic against the page path. There is no HTTP lookup. Scope does not change editor suggestions — it only bounds bulk apply.

How Auto-link scope works.

Link Health reports internal links whose targets are unpublished, in trash, or missing. Run a manual scan from the admin screen. Jobs run in the background, and drain in the admin request on quiet sites.

Core Plus Links does not crawl the public internet and does not HTTP-check external URLs. Unresolved short links such as /go/ affiliate URLs are not reported as broken. External HTTP checking and scheduled scans are Upcoming in Pro.

What Link Health checks, and what it does not.

Indexing runs as a background job, not during page loads. Suggestions are served from the local index. Reindexing can be scheduled, and job health can be monitored from the admin.

On sites where background jobs depend on WP-Cron and traffic is low, indexing can stall. See troubleshooting for what to check.