Docs / The action queue
The action queue
A prioritised list of specific changes, each one previewed before anything is written.
The action queue is a prioritised list of specific, justified changes, each of which you can preview before anything happens. It is a Pro feature.
The line between the plans is deliberate: diagnosis is free, acting on it is Pro. Health scores, the per post recommendation, the link inventory and the orphan report all work on Free. What Pro adds is the prioritised queue, the preview, and the one click that carries the change out.
How an action gets done
- Preview. PostPulse shows exactly what it proposes to change, including the surrounding text for anything that touches your content.
- Approve. For actions that need a value, such as a new title, you supply or edit it here. Nothing is written yet.
- Execute. The change is made. Only now is your post touched.
You can snooze anything you do not want to see now, or reject it outright. Actions that stop being true are swept out on the next sync, so a broken link you fixed by hand does not sit in the queue pretending to be work.
Priority
High, Medium and Low. High is reserved for things with a number attached: a page that ranks well and is not being clicked, a ranking that slipped, a dead link, an affiliate link paying someone else.
Actions that change your post
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Update title | Sets the SEO title used in search results. See the note below. |
| Update meta description | Sets the description shown under your result. |
| Add inbound link | Adds a link from another post to this one, in a paragraph that already mentions the subject. |
| Add outbound link | Adds a link from this post to another of yours. |
| Fix broken link | Updates or removes a link whose destination is gone. Grouped by destination, so one dead URL is one job rather than one per post. |
| Redirect a dead URL | Points a 404 that is getting real traffic at the page that should have it. |
| Redirect to stronger post | Consolidates a weak post into a better one and redirects the old URL. |
| Set to noindex | Asks search engines to drop a thin page from the index. |
Update title does not rename your post. It sets the title search engines show. The headline on the page, in your menus, in archives and in your feed stays exactly as you wrote it. If you have an SEO plugin, PostPulse writes to its title field; if you do not, PostPulse outputs the tag itself.
Actions that only advise
Some problems cannot be fixed by an automated edit, because deciding what to write is the work. These appear in the queue with a Mark as Done button instead of Execute, and PostPulse never touches the post.
| Action | What it is telling you |
|---|---|
| Push to page 1 | You rank 11 to 20 for a real query. It names the query, the position and what page one would be worth. |
| Ranking slipped | You lost several places for a query that was sending traffic. |
| Ranking lost | A query that used to bring impressions now brings none. |
| New ranking to claim | You have started ranking for something new. Lean into it. |
| Affiliate link problem | A link carries someone else's tag, or its destination is gone. See below. |
Marking one done still matters. It records the date, which is what Recovery Impact measures traffic against afterwards.
Affiliate links
An affiliate link can fail while returning a perfectly healthy response, which is why an ordinary broken link check never catches it. PostPulse looks for two cases: a link carrying a tag that is not yours, which pays a stranger every time a reader buys, and a destination that has quietly become a search page or a homepage because the product is gone.
Why the queue goes quiet, then fills again
The first pass is a cleanup and it is usually the biggest: broken links, missing descriptions, posts with no inbound links. Once that is done the queue should be short.
What keeps it useful afterwards is the ranking work, because rankings move whether or not you touch anything. Slipped positions, lost queries, new queries and click gaps are all recalculated from fresh Search Console data, so they reappear on their own.
AI assistance
Pro includes AI for the places where wording is the work: refresh briefs, SEO titles, meta descriptions, anchor text, keyword suggestions and category checks. Free includes no AI.
The monthly allowance is split in two, because the jobs are not the same size:
- 25 in depth requests a month, for refresh briefs and link suggestions.
- 200 quick requests a month, for titles, descriptions, anchor text, keyword and category suggestions.
Splitting them keeps the quick allowance generous rather than sizing everything as though it were the expensive job. Your remaining balance is shown in the plugin, and a failed request never costs you an action.
Did it work?
Recovery Impact compares clicks before and after each completed action over equal windows, so you can see whether acting on a recommendation actually recovered traffic. It needs a few weeks to say anything meaningful.
A note on multiple sites
The action queue and alerts cover the whole WordPress install rather than one Search Console property, so if you have several properties connected you will see actions for all of them together. Post scores and traffic charts are filtered by the property you pick.
Next: see how linking works in Internal links and auto-links.