Magic Linking – Internal Links

Only when you press Link on a suggestion or apply a rule, or when you publish or update a post that matches a rule you created. In every case it only adds a link.

• Outbound suggestions (for the post you are editing): the link is inserted in the editor itself. You save the post when you want, as with any other change.
• Inbound suggestions (links from other posts to this one): the link is written into the other post on the server. The rest of that post must stay identical, byte for byte, or nothing is written. WordPress creates a revision, and the change is listed in History, where you can undo it.
• Automatic rules (the ones you create in Magic Linking > Rules) add their links in the background after you publish or update a post, with the same check and the same post in History.
• It never modifies a post that is open in an editor, and it only edits, removes or rewrites a link you already had when you ask for it from the broken links list (change its destination or remove it, keeping its text), with the same check and undo.

Everything else (the report, the index, the settings, the broken links list until you fix one) only reads your content and writes to its own tables.

Go to Magic Linking > Rules , add a rule (a phrase, its variants and the post it should link to) and save it. From then on, when you publish or update a post whose text contains the phrase, the link is added in the background. To use a rule on posts you already have, press Apply to existing entries on the rule, review the sentence shown for each post and press Add link on the ones you want. You can create as many rules as you like. Rules never remove or change a link and respect your limits in Settings > Suggestions.

No. In this version you add the links one post at a time, after seeing the sentence. Each one is recorded in History as “Automatic rule” and can be undone.

No. A rule does not add again a link you undid in that post. If you edit the rule (phrase, destination or options), it counts as a new rule and may add its link again.

Yes. On each row of the report, Inbound suggestions and Outbound suggestions open a side panel with the same suggestions as the editor. Press Link on the ones you like; the numbers of the row update and you can undo each link there or from History. You need permission to edit that post.

Right after adding it, press Undo on the card. Later, open Magic Linking > History and undo it there. You can also redo it. If the text around the link has been edited since, Magic Linking tells you instead of changing anything it cannot be sure about.

For one post, press Exclude from the analysis on its row in the report. For whole categories, go to Settings > General and pick them under Categories left out . An excluded post is neither suggested nor used as a source of links; links that other posts already have to it still count. You can include it again at any time, and the report lists the excluded posts with the reason.

Phrases you write for a post (in the Target phrases section of the editor panel, up to 10, each with a few variants) to say “link to this post when the text says this”. They are used by the suggestions like the post’s own focus keyword, and they never add a link by themselves.

Yes, if you turn on Detect the language of each entry from its text in Settings > General. It is off by default, does nothing while WPML or Polylang is active (they take priority) and, when it is not sure, uses the language of the site. It is checked on Spanish and English texts; other languages are not validated yet, so do not rely on it for them.

The Status tab shows the time of the last 20 suggestion requests, split by phase, with the budget each should meet. It is a diagnostic: nothing is sent anywhere.

In Settings > Suggestions > Show advanced settings : the key terms kept per post and the score threshold. The defaults are right for most sites; changing the number of terms rebuilds the index in the background.

Only the links written inside the content of each post are counted. Links in menus, widgets, theme templates or blocks that are pulled from somewhere else are not, so your home page or a page that is only linked from the menu can appear as an orphan. Content that a page builder keeps outside the normal post content is not read. If your builder saves rendered HTML in the post content, it is read. Inbound = how many different posts link to this one, counting only links that work. Outbound = internal links to other pages; every appearance counts. Links to the same post, to files or to mailto: and tel: are not counted. Category, tag, author, date and search pages, the home page and feeds are valid destinations and are never reported as broken. Tracking parameters ( utm_* , gclid , fbclid …) and anchors ( #… ) are ignored when matching a link to a post.

No. It works entirely on your server, with no key, no account and no credit. AI is an optional extra: if you connect a provider in Settings > Connectors (WordPress 7.0 or later), the Improve with AI button appears. Magic Linking never asks for an API key of its own and does not sell credit; your provider charges you for what you use.

Not by itself. The only time text leaves your server is when you press Improve with AI , and then it goes to the AI provider you set up in Settings > Connectors, as described in “AI and your privacy” and “External services”. With a local model such as Ollama it does not leave your server.

The button shows an estimate before you press it and the real number of tokens afterwards. A request uses a few thousand tokens, which with a small model costs a fraction of a cent. You can set a daily token limit in Settings > AI. A local model costs nothing.

Because the site has no AI connector (add one in Settings > Connectors), WordPress is older than 7.0, the daily limit in Settings > AI is 0, or the site blocks AI requests.

The suggestions come from the index of your site, which is built in the background after you press Analyze my site . Until it is ready the panel says so. Also, suggestions need text: a very short post has little to suggest, and posts in another language, drafts, private posts and password-protected ones are never proposed as destinations.

Yes. Tick Pillar content in the panel (while Yoast SEO or Rank Math are active, their cornerstone or pillar mark also counts, without asking you anything): links to those posts rank a little higher. In Settings → Suggestions you can ignore, take into account or require the content type, category and tag. These are quality settings, never limits.

Links are only inserted in paragraphs and lists, and never inside an existing link. Headings, quotes and tables are off by default: turn them on in Magic Linking > Settings > Links > Where links can be inserted. A developer can allow more block types with magiclinking_insertable_blocks .

Yes, with a Magic Linking box. Links are inserted in the Visual tab; in Text the box explains how to switch.

Because it is not linked from the content of any other post. If it is linked from your menu, the menu is not counted. See “How links are counted”.

A link is reported when it points to a post in the trash, unpublished or private, or to an address of your site that WordPress does not recognise. If a redirect plugin sends the old address elsewhere, the link may still work for your visitors. Developers can tell Magic Linking about redirects with the magiclinking_resolve_link filter.

Yes. It records the language of every post, never suggests a link between two languages and, when WPML or Polylang is active (or the analysis finds more than one language), shows it in the report, lets you filter by it and adds it to the CSV. On a single-language site those columns are hidden.

A few seconds for a small site; thousands of posts per minute on ordinary hosting. It runs in the background; you can keep working and watch the progress on the screen.

It needs Action Scheduler to run, which WordPress triggers with WP-Cron. On sites with very little traffic, use a system cron, or run wp action-scheduler run --group=magic-linking , or analyse directly from the terminal with wp magic-linking index .

Press “Analyze changes” in the report (or run wp magic-linking index ). It goes through every post but skips the ones whose content has not changed since the last analysis, and tells you how many were new or modified. Posts are also analysed again automatically when you save them.

Go to Magic Linking > Settings, open the General tab, find the “Maintenance” section and press “Analyze everything again from scratch” (or run wp magic-linking index --force ). It asks you to confirm and then runs in the background, even for posts that have not changed. It never changes your content.

By default your data is kept. If you tick “Delete all Magic Linking data when the plugin is deleted” in the settings, its tables (index, links, history), processes, settings and metadata are