Auto linking rules
Set a keyword once. Link it everywhere.
Your best pages are missing links from posts you have forgotten you wrote. Tell Linkilo that “cigar humidor” should point at your humidor guide, and it finds every post where that phrase appears, including everything from three years ago, and links it. With a dry run first, so nothing is a surprise.
Included in every plan. 30-day money-back guarantee.
Keyword cigar humidor → /guides/cigar-humidors/ · one link per post, skip headings, skip existing links
Three posts from the archive
Best Travel Humidors 2026. A travel case is not a cigar humidor in the strict sense, but for a week away it does the same job, and the best ones hold humidity for ten days.
Boveda vs Beads. Whichever you pick, the cigar humidor itself matters more than the pack inside it; a leaky seal defeats both.
How to Season a New Humidor. If you already read our cigar humidor guide, skip to step two. A seasoned cigar humidor holds steady within a point.
The third post already links the phrase, so the rule leaves it alone: one link per post, never a second one on the same words.
The job, as it stands
Automatic internal linking in WordPress, and the work it ends
Decide that every mention of a phrase should link somewhere. Then go and do it, in every post, and again in every post you write afterwards, and again when the destination URL changes.
By hand, that means
- Decide which phrases should always link where.
- Search every post for each phrase.
- Open each one, check the phrase is not already linked or sitting in a heading, and add the link.
- Watch for the same phrase in every post you publish afterwards.
- Redo all of it when the destination URL changes.
Linkilo does every step of that.
What it costs to leave it
The rule you keep in your head stops being applied the month you get busy. Six months on, half your posts mention the product and link to it, half mention it and do not, and the only way to tell which is which is to read all of them.
Somebody has to do that: you, or somebody you pay.
What you get back
The forever part. The rule is written once instead of applied by hand indefinitely.
What it looks like instead
You write the phrase. It links. You change the destination once and every instance follows.
How soon
A rule applies on the next save, or across the archive on demand.
Who does the work
Deterministic
Rules you write, matched exactly as you specify: exact phrase or partial, per category, capped per post. Predictable on purpose: this is the module where a surprise is a bug.
Time figures describe the shape of the job (an afternoon, a day, a week), not a promise about your site. Your archive is your archive.
New posts get links. Your archive never does.
When you publish a pillar page, linking to it is fresh in your mind for about a fortnight. After that every new post gets the link and the two hundred older ones never do, which is how most sites end up with their best page supported almost entirely by recent content.
What actually happens
- You remember to link the new pillar page from posts you write this month
- You never go back and link it from the two hundred older ones
- Searching your own site for a phrase, post by post, is nobody’s idea of a morning
- You accidentally link the same destination four times in one article
- Eventually you accept that older content is simply disconnected
What a rule does instead
- Write the rule once and it applies to the entire archive
- See the full candidate list before a single character is written
- Self-links, duplicates and over-linked posts filtered out automatically
- Import a hundred keyword rules from a spreadsheet in one go
- New posts get linked as they publish, without you thinking about it
The questions you should ask before letting software edit your posts
Auto-linking has a bad reputation because it is usually done badly. Here is how each of those failure modes is handled.
“What will it actually change?”
Select your candidates and preview. You get a summary of selected, ready, needs review and blocked, and the preview is completely read-only.
“Why was this one blocked?”
Every blocked candidate tells you why: a duplicate, an existing rule already covering that post, the destination already linked in that sentence, a post-level cap, or a self-link.
“Will it turn my article blue?”
Not unless you configure it to. Cap how many times a keyword can be linked per post, and Linkilo stops at the limit rather than linking every occurrence.
“Can I limit where it applies?”
Filter a rule by post type, category and content area, so a rule meant for blog posts never touches your product pages.
“Will it match inside other words?”
Whole-word matching is available, along with case sensitivity options, so “humid” never matches “humidity” unless you explicitly want it to.
“Can I do a hundred at once?”
Import a CSV of keyword-to-URL pairs and every rule is created together. Most SEO teams already keep this map somewhere; this is where it becomes real.
“What if I change my mind?”
Rules can be edited or disabled individually at any time, insertions are logged, and rollback snapshots are taken before content is edited.
“Will a big run break my site?”
Batches are capped, with a configurable limit on selected previews and creations, specifically so a large run cannot overwhelm shared hosting.
“How is this different from the AI suggestions?”
Rules are deterministic: you decide the keyword and the destination. AI suggestions are contextual and find connections you would never write a rule for. Most sites use both.
Automation with the brakes fitted
See exactly what it will do before it does it
This is the feature that makes the rest of it safe. Select your candidates, hit preview, and Linkilo returns a per-candidate verdict without touching a single post.
Ready means it will insert cleanly. Needs review means something about the context deserves your eyes. Blocked means it will not proceed, and it tells you which specific conflict caused that. The preview does not remove candidate rows or change content in any way.
- Read-only dry run with a verdict on every candidate
- Conflict checks for duplicates, existing rules and self-links
- Destination-already-linked-in-this-sentence detection
- Post-level link caps enforced before insertion, not after
Selected 50 candidates
Ready 41
Review 6 anchor appears more than once in the post
Blocked 3 post already at its link cap
Nothing has been written. Close this and your content is untouched.
Rules that respect your editorial judgment
The reason auto-linking gets a bad name is tools that link every occurrence of every keyword everywhere. That produces articles that read like a search results page and helps nobody.
Limit a rule to specific post types or categories. Cap how many times a keyword links per post. Exclude words and sections that should never be matched. The automation works inside boundaries you set rather than around them.
- Filter by post type, category and content area
- Maximum links per keyword, per post
- Excluded words and excluded sections
- Whole-word and case-sensitivity options
- Skip if the destination is already linked nearby
Post types Posts Pages
Max per post 1
Whole words only On
Skip if already linked On
Case sensitive Off
A hundred rules from one spreadsheet
If you already keep a keyword-to-URL map, and most SEO teams do, import it as a CSV and every rule is created at once.
This is the difference between auto-linking being a nice idea and it actually shipping on a large site. Nobody is going to hand-enter ninety rules through a form, so in practice the feature only exists if the import does.
- CSV import for bulk keyword rules
- Export your rules back out for review or handover
- Edit or disable any rule individually at any time
- New posts are matched against existing rules as they publish
keyword,url
cigar humidor,/guides/cigar-humidors/
humidor seasoning,/blog/season-a-humidor/
travel humidor,/guides/travel-humidors/
104 rules imported 2 duplicates skipped
The auto-link rules screen, exactly as it ships.
One row per keyword: where it points, how many times it may fire, and which post types it is allowed to touch. Rules apply on render, so nothing is written into your content.
Add New Auto Links
Create keyword → URL rules that Linkilo turns into internal links automatically across your content.
Add a keyword → URL rule and Linkilo automatically turns matching phrases in your content into internal links to that URL. Use the ⚙ Settings panel to control one-link-per-post, dofollow, insertion priority, category limits and post-type whitelists. After adding or editing rules, click Perform Scan to apply them across your site.
Recreated from templates/relate_keywords.php. Same fields, same limits, same controls.
Where a rule beats a suggestion
Rules are for the pages you already know matter. Suggestions are for the connections you would never have thought of. These are the cases where rules win.
Sites with a big back catalog
Old posts will realistically never be revisited by hand.
With Linkilo: one rule reaches every one of them, including the ones you forgot existed.
Affiliate publishers
Money pages need consistent links from everywhere.
With Linkilo: set the rule, keep the caps sane, and stop thinking about it.
Glossary and docs sites
Every term should link to its definition. Nobody does it manually.
With Linkilo: import the glossary as rules and it simply happens.
Multi-author teams
Every writer links differently, or not at all.
With Linkilo: house linking rules apply regardless of who wrote the post.
Ecommerce
Category pages need links from every guide that mentions them.
With Linkilo: one rule per category, applied across the entire blog.
Agencies
The same linking strategy has to be applied across many client sites.
With Linkilo: export the rule set from one site and import it into the next.
From one keyword to your whole archive
Write the rule
A keyword, a destination, and any filters you want on post type or category. Or import a CSV of them.
Preview the candidates
Linkilo shows every post the rule would touch, with ready, review and blocked verdicts and the reason for each block.
Apply what you approve
Insert the ready ones in a capped batch, with a rollback snapshot written before the first change.
The objections worth taking seriously
Auto links are rule-based and deterministic: you decide the keyword and the destination and it applies everywhere that phrase appears. AI suggestions are contextual and per-post, proposing links you had not thought of. Most sites run both, using rules for the pages they know matter and suggestions for the connections they would never spot.
Only if you configure it to. Per-post caps, whole-word matching and skip-if-already-linked all exist specifically to prevent that, and the dry run shows you the result before anything is written. Start with a cap of one per post and raise it only if you want more.
Yes. Insertions are logged, rollback snapshots are taken before content edits, and any rule can be disabled or deleted, which stops it applying to anything new.
That is the entire point, and it is why the dry run and the caps exist. Every post it touches is permission-checked first, only the matched phrase is wrapped in an anchor, and the surrounding text is never rewritten.
Sensible caps are the answer, and the anchor text report will tell you if a rule has pushed a page into exact-match overuse. The two features are designed to be used together for exactly this reason.
Yes. Once a rule exists, posts you publish afterwards are matched against it, so the linking strategy applies going forward without anyone remembering it.
AI Internal Link Suggestions
Get link suggestions a human editor would approve, and add them in one click without leaving the editor.
Anchor Text Reporting Tool
See every anchor pointing at every page, and catch the over-optimized ones before Google does.
Related Posts
Show related posts under every article, chosen by meaning rather than tag soup.
Link your whole archive from one rule.
Write it once, preview exactly what will change, and connect every post you have already published to the pages that matter.
30-day money-back guarantee. Every feature is included in every plan.