Internal links and auto-links: PostPulse docs

Auto-links

An auto-link rule is a keyword and a destination. Wherever that keyword appears in your posts, PostPulse turns it into a link, without you editing anything.

Auto-links are never saved into your content. They are added when the page is built for a visitor, so search engines see ordinary links in the HTML while your stored posts stay exactly as you wrote them. Change a rule and every occurrence changes at once. Delete a rule and the links are simply gone, with no cleanup and nothing left behind.

Free includes 15 rules. Pro has no limit.

Where links are allowed to land

Left alone, keyword linking produces walls of links. Three settings prevent that:

Max per post, per rule. How many times one rule may link inside a single post.
Max per post, all rules. A ceiling across every rule combined. Three by default.
Minimum paragraph gap. How many paragraphs must sit between any two auto-links. Three by default.

Text that is already inside a link, or inside code, script or preformatted blocks, is never touched, so you cannot end up with a link inside a link.

Working in the editor

The PostPulse panel in the post editor shows every match in the current post and highlights it in the content. From there you can:

Suppress a single occurrence you do not want, without disabling the rule everywhere.
Force active a match that was skipped by the spacing or ceiling rules, when you want that one anyway.
Select text and create a rule from it without leaving the post.
Exclude the whole post from auto-linking.

The panel works in both the block editor and the classic editor.

Near misses

If a rule almost matched, PostPulse says so. A rule for "sliding miter saw" against a post that says "miter saw" links nothing and would otherwise be invisible, so the panel shows what you wrote next to the keyword that would link, and a small reword earns the link.

Conflicts

PostPulse warns when a rule would duplicate work you have already done by hand: when the same wording is already linked to a different page, or when the post already links to that destination under other wording. It flags these rather than changing them, because either can be deliberate.

There is also a Replace Manual Links action per rule, which unwraps existing manual links whose anchor text exactly matches the keyword so the rule takes over. It shows you every affected post and its current destination first, and needs a second click to confirm.

Bringing rules in from elsewhere

You can import a CSV, and there is a direct importer for Internal Link Juicer that reads its keywords straight from your database with no export step. Imported rules obey the same limits and duplicate checks as rules you type in.

Link inventory

PostPulse crawls your published posts and records every link, internal and external. Available on Free.

Broken links, with the actual HTTP status and what it means in plain words.
Orphans, published posts with no internal links pointing at them.
Poor anchor text, such as "click here" or a bare URL.
Cannibalised anchors, the same wording pointing at different destinations.
Link gaps, including reciprocal opportunities and posts with no outbound internal links.

Grouped views by destination, domain and anchor text all expand to show the individual links behind the count.

What is crawled

Published posts are crawled as link sources. Pages are not, though a page can still be the destination of a link and can still be reported as broken.

External links

Checking that external destinations still resolve is a Pro feature. PostPulse identifies itself as an ordinary browser when it does, because sites routinely block requests that announce themselves as bots and that produced false reports of broken links.

Internal links that are not WordPress posts are checked, not assumed broken. Link cloaking and redirect plugins create working URLs on your domain that are not posts, so a database lookup alone would call them broken. PostPulse requests them instead, and only an actual response counts. If the request fails outright, the link is left alone for the next sync rather than being condemned, because a server that cannot call itself is a known WordPress quirk and not evidence about the link.

The 404 monitor

A Pro feature. PostPulse records URLs that returned 404, how often, and where the visitor came from. For each one it suggests destinations by matching words in the dead URL against your post titles and slugs, and you can set a redirect in one click or enter your own.

Only 404s that are getting real traffic and have a plausible destination become queue actions. A dead URL with nowhere sensible to go is a decision about whether that content should exist, so it stays in the monitor rather than being presented as a chore.

Click tracking

PostPulse counts clicks on the links it inserts, so you can see which rules earn their place. It records the rule, the post and the time. It does not store visitor IP addresses, it ignores obvious bots, and old rows are cleared out on a schedule you control.

Next: set up notifications in Alerts and email.