Find orphan content, broken internal links, and link suggestions built from what each page is about - not just its title.
Getting started
- Tools → Internal Links → Dashboard: run the first scan. It indexes every internal link on the site.
- Orphan Posts: content nothing links to - your quickest SEO wins.
- Suggestions: for each post, ranked opportunities to link to related content, with the anchor text found in your actual copy. Apply inserts the link at the first occurrence in the post's visible text (never inside image alt text, captions, headings, shortcodes, block settings or an existing link), without touching anything else. If the post cannot be saved, the suggestion stays pending and the error is shown. Keywords are matched as whole words only ("cat" never matches inside "category"), in any language. Dismiss is remembered: that page is not suggested for that post again when suggestions are regenerated.
How suggestions are found and ranked
For each page you could link to, the plugin builds candidate anchors from its distinctive terms: phrases of one to three words from its title, and the words its content is most about (by TF-IDF across your posts). It looks for them as whole words in the post's linkable text. A single word is only used when it is one of the page's main terms, at least four letters long, not shared by most of your posts (so common words such as "garden" on a gardening site are not suggested on their own), used at least twice in the page when it comes from the content rather than the title, and when the two posts also have another distinctive word in common. Each post is checked against up to 100 of your newest pages, with a fixed amount of work per post, so large sites stay fast.
The candidates are then scored by TF-IDF document similarity across your content - the genuinely related page outranks one whose title merely appears in the text. One anchor is only ever offered for one page, and each page gets at most one suggestion per post. Optionally, add your own AI API key (OpenAI, Anthropic or Google) under Settings and the front-runners are re-ranked for editorial relevance: one small request per post, your key stored encrypted, no account with us needed. Without a key, the built-in similarity scoring applies.
Link Health
The Dashboard lists internal links from published posts to a page that is trashed, deleted, a draft, pending or scheduled. They stay listed on every scan, including the scheduled one, until you fix the link or the page is published again (a restored page comes back as a draft, so it is listed until you publish it). A link to a page that was deleted before the plugin ever scanned the linking post cannot be traced back to a page, unless it uses the page's ID (?p=123).
Settings
- Post types to scan and auto-scan on save. Only published posts of these types count: a post that is unpublished, made private, trashed or deleted drops out of the link counts straight away, and the pages it linked to are recounted.
- Full Scan Frequency: daily or weekly. Changing it moves the background scan to the new schedule, with the first run one day or one week later.
- Minimum Keyword Words: the fewest words for the phrases copied from a target's title as written (the full title, and a shorter phrase of its main words). Anchors built from a page's distinctive terms (above) can be shorter; they are held to the distinctiveness rules instead.
- Exclude Categories: posts in these categories are left out of scanning, suggestions (as the post being linked from or the page being linked to), the orphan and low-outbound lists, and the dashboard's orphan count. The lists and the count change straight away; the link counts of pages those posts linked to catch up at the next full scan (or run one from the Dashboard). The same applies when you remove a post type.
- The AI ranking section, and the delete-data-on-uninstall opt-in.
Data & privacy
The link index and suggestions live in your database. With AI ranking enabled, post titles/excerpts of candidate pages go to the provider you chose - and nowhere else. Uninstall keeps your data by default.
Uninstall
Deleting the plugin keeps all its data by default, so a reinstall picks up where you left off. To remove everything on uninstall, tick Delete all data on uninstall in the plugin's settings first (this sets the dragoninternallinks_delete_data_on_uninstall option).