Created: 31/05/2021
By: DAEXT
Email: support@daext.com
Thank you for using Interlinks Manager. If you have any questions that are beyond the scope of this help file, please contact us with one of the methods described in our Support Page.
This video series covers the functionalities of the Interlinks Manager plugin.
Please note that not all the aspects and implications are covered in this section, it's recommended that you read the entire documentation (FAQ included) before using this plugin in a production environment or asking for support to the plugin author.
With this procedure you will be able to install the Interlinks Manager plugin on your WordPress website.
This plugin supports both a Network Activation (the plugin will be activate on all the sites of your WordPress Network) and a Single Site Activation in a WordPress Network environment (your plugin will be activate on single site of the network).
With this procedure you will be able to perform a Network Activation:
With this procedure you will be able to perform a Single Site Activation in a WordPress Network environment:
Please note that this plugin should be not activated on sites of a WordPress Network managed by untrusted users, the CPU intensive analysis of the posts and the ability of the untrusted users to create an unlimited number of keywords in the AIL menu might expose your website to DOS attacks caused by an overload of your server CPU.
With this procedure you will be able to update the Interlinks Manager plugin:
To update the plugin in all the sites of your WordPress Network follow this procedure:
To update the plugin in single sites of the WordPress Network follow this procedure:
The Dashboard Menu allows you to generate data and statistics about the internal links available in the posts, pages and custom post types of your blog.
You can generate these data for the first time or update your data by following this procedure:
Each row of the generated table will present the following information:
The Filter & Sort section available in the Dashboard menu gives you the ability to:
With the Download button available in the Export CSV section you can export all the data in CSV format, for details on how to import the generated CSV files in a spreadsheet software see the FAQ How to import the generated CSV data in a spreadsheet software.
The Juice Menu gives you information about the flow of link juice on the URLs of your website.
To get started follow this procedure:
Please note that in the fifth column of each rows you can find two buttons. The first button should be used to view a table that includes a list of the internal links that contribute to generate the overall link juice of the URL associated with the specific row. The second button should be used to download (in CSV format) a list of the internal links that contribute to generate the overall link juice of the URL associated with the specific row.
With the Download button available in the Export CSV section, or by clicking the button available in the fifth column of each row, you can export your data in CSV format, for details on how to import the generated CSV files in a spreadsheet software see FAQ How to import the generated CSV data in a spreadsheet software.
The Hits Menu is used to display every click made on your internal links.
Each row of the table will present the following information:
With the Download button available in the Export CSV section, you can export all the data in CSV format, for details on how to import the generated CSV files in a spreadsheet software see the FAQ How to import the generated CSV data in a spreadsheet software.
Please note that your internal links are tracked only if the Track Internal Links option is enabled.
The AIL Menu allows you to automatically convert specific keywords or phrases to internal links and can be especially useful if you want to:
If you are going to implement auto internal links in a production environment consider to enable the Test Mode option, so you will be free to experiment and even make mistakes without messing up your website. For details on the Test Mode option please see the FAQ How the test mode works.
The Interlinks Suggestions meta box is a tool that helps you find articles related with the post being edited and can be used to build an effective SEO internal links strategy with links that are natural for the reader and that improve the user engagement on the site.
The Interlinks Suggestions meta box is available in all the post types defined with the Interlinks Suggestions Post Types option.
You can get a list of suggestions by following this procedure:
You can tune the algorithm used to find the recommended posts with the options available in the Suggestions tab of your options.
To deeply understand how the algorithm works consider what follows:
I mentioned the score of the post in the list above, this value is used to rank higher or lower specific posts in the overall results of the algorithm, this means that when you have many results, only the posts with the higher score will be able to enter in the pool of results.
Please note that the maximum number of posts analyzed by this algorithm is determined by the Limit Posts Analysis option, you might consider to increase this option value if you are planning to examine more posts with this algorithm, you might also consider to decrease this option value if you have performance issues and what you want is to decrease the time required to get the suggestions.
The Interlinks Optimization meta box is able to tell you if the number of internal links of the post is optimized.
As with the Interlinks Suggestions meta box, the post being edited should be saved in order to get the actual status of the optimization.
To understand what is an "Optimized Post" consider what follows:
The optimization status of a post is also displayed in the Dashboard menu under the OF (Optimization Flag) column, so you will be able to browse through your posts directly in the Dashboard menu and easily find which posts don't have an optimized number of interlinks. The purpose is that by identifying not-optimized posts directly in the Dashboard menu you will be able to fix them (by adding or removing internal links) without losing the time required to actually enter in a post to understand its optimization status.
Please note that the Characters per Interlink default value of 1000, used to determine the optimal number of interlinks of the post, should not be considered as a good or recommended value, you as administrator (or your SEO team) should determine which is the right value for this important option.
The Interlinks Options meta box includes two options:
Please note that these two options are actually saved only when you save the post with the Publish/Update button.
This plugin makes use of the following resources:
For each library you can find the actual copy of the license inside the folder used to store the library files.
When the link juice of a specific link is calculated the following information are retrieved:
SEO POWER = The SEO Power of the post TOTAL LINKS = The total number of links of the post LINKS BEFORE = The number of internal links that precede the link being considered
PENALITY PER POSITION = The value of the "Penality per Position" option
Then this formula is applied to calculate the link juice:
LINK JUICE = SEO POWER / TOTAL LINKS - ( SEO POWER / TOTAL LINKS / 100 * PENALITY PER POSITION * LINKS BEFORE )
Please note that the link juice calculated by this plugin is based on the SEO Power of your internal links and does not consider links to your website URLs that come from external websites. For this reason should be used to have only an idea of how much strength your are assigning to specific URLs of your website with your internal links strategy. You should not assume that the URLs of your website that receives more link juice from your internal links are considered by the search engines as the most important URLs of your website because search engines consider many factors.
The link juice of an URL is calculated with a sum of all the single calculated link juice of the links that have the URL being considered as value of the href attribute of the a element. To understand how the link juice of a single link is calculated please see the FAQ How the link juice of a single link is calculated.
In search engines terms, important pages (page with high page rank, pages with many links on the web, pages that receives an high amount of visits, pages that are linked from important area of your website, etc.) have more SEO Power to share on the their links, for this reason might be appropriate to increase or decrease the SEO Power of specific pages to have a more realistic flow of link juice.
All the CSV data generated with this plugin can be imported in your favorite spreadsheet software by selecting the following options:
In the Capabilities tab available in the Interlinks -> Options menu you can select the capability required to get access on specific plugin features.
If you are not familiar with the WordPress roles and capabilities please check out Roles and Capabilities, to grant the access to a specific plugin feature only to users that have specific roles please see the Capability vs Role and then pick up the proper capability.
The seven plugin features that are enabled only when a specific capability is associated with the user that is using the plugin are the following:
For security reasons the access to the Interlinks -> Options menu is only granted to the users with the "manage_options" capability, and by default this capability is available only to the Administrator and to the Super Admin roles.
The three meta boxes provided by this plugin can be enabled only with specific post types with the Meta Boxes tab available in the Interlinks -> Options menu.
For example you might decide to enable the Interlinks Optimization meta box only with the "post" and with the "review" post types because you don't need to optimize the number of internal links in your "page" and in your "portfolio" post types. To achieve this simply enter "post, review" in the Interlinks Optimization Post Types option.
The analysis on your posts performed by the plugin to get information about your internal links, to get information about the link juice and to get suggestions in the Interlinks Suggestions meta box might be pretty slow if one or more of the following conditions occur:
if you want to complete the analysis of the posts in few seconds is therefore very import to:
To avoid errors such as "Maximum execution time of x seconds exceeded" or "Allowed memory size of x bytes exhausted" it's important to consider that:
Please note that the custom max_execution_time and memory_limit values defined with the plugin will be applied only on the scripts used by the plugin and won't affect any script outside the plugin.
It's also important to note that in some cases the custom max_execution_time and memory_limit values defined through the plugin options (and actually applied with the ini_set() PHP function) might be ignored. In such cases you have to configure your server (or ask to your hosting provider to configure) with different values in the max_execution_time and memory_limit directives.
If the max_execution_time and memory_limit values defined through the plugin option are ignored and your current hosting plan doesn't allow you to increase these values even manually after a support ticket, the only solution is to set the Limit Posts Analysis option with a value smaller than 1000 and not exceeding more than 100 keywords in the AIL menu.
To automatically remove anchors from every URL used to calculate the link juice you can use the Remove Link to Anchor option available in the Juice tab of the Interlinks -> Options menu.
With this option enabled, if in your posts you are linking for example to:
these links will contribute to generate link juice only for a single URL, that is "http://example.com".
To automatically remove URL parameters from every URL used to calculate the link juice you can use the Remove URL Parameters option available in the Juice tab of the Interlinks -> Options menu.
With this option enabled, if in your posts you are linking for example to:
these links will contribute to generate link juice only for a single URL, that is "http://example.com".
It's very important to consider that this option should not be enabled if your website is using URL parameters to actually identify specific pages, for example with pretty permalinks not enabled.
The Test Mode is an option available in the Advanced tab of the Interlinks -> Options menu.
When the test mode is enabled your auto internal links defined with the AIL menu will be actually applied on the front-end of your website only to the WordPress users that have the capability defined with the AIL Menu option. (available in the Capabilities tab of the Interlinks -> Options menu)
This means that, when the test mode is enabled, only the users that have access to the AIL menu (and thus only the users that can create or modify auto internal links), will actually see the auto internal links on the posts. This allows you to create auto internal links in a production environment without worrying about messing up the content of your posts.
It's therefore obvious, but important to note, that if the test mode is enabled, your visitors and your logged-in users that don't have the required capability, won't see any auto internal link applied to your posts.
Please also note that while in test mode, the data and statistics generated in the back-end of the plugin will consider the auto internal links applied, this behavior allows you to have more information about your applied auto internal links before you actually activate them (by disabling the Test Mode) to your visitors.
The Protected Tags, that you are free to edit with the Protected Tags option available in the AIL tab of the Interlinks -> Options menu, allow you to not apply the auto internal links on specific tags present in your posts.
Let's say that you have created an auto internal link that converts the word "dreamer" to a link, but you don't want to convert the word "dreamer" inside a blockquote element with the quote "You may say that I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one". You can solve the problem simply by adding the tag "blockquote" in the list of protected tags.
Please note that by protecting non-void tags you prevent any nested element from having applied an auto internal link.
The Site Address (URL) option available in the Settings -> General menu is used to distinguish between your internal and external links. This means that every link that points to an internal link should start with the value of the Site Address (URL) to be detected by the regular expressions used to analyze the content of the posts.
The regular expressions used to detect the manual internal links in the posts are made to detect links with the a elements defined using the HTML5 syntax defined by the W3C and with the href attribute that starts with the value of the Site Address (URL) option (available in the Settings -> General menu).
You should also consider that the internal links applied through shortcodes are not parsed, the reason is that shortcodes might have different behaviors if applied on the actual posts in the front-end or during the analysis of the posts performed by the plugin, and this would produce unreliable results.
The "Generic" boundary available in the select box of the Left Boundary and Right Boundary options (in the AIL menu) is a generic boundary able to detect transitions between Unicode characters and Unicode non-characters.
For example if you assign the "Generic" boundary as the Left Boundary of the keyword "cat", the keyword will be matched by the regular expressions in the following cases:
but not on the following cases:
Links are considered internal links in a site of a WordPress Network when the href attribute of the a element starts with the Site URL of the specific site.
For example if you are analyzing the internal links from the "My Site 1" site, that has in the Site URL the value "http://example.com/mysite1/", the following links analyzed in the posts of "My Site 1" will be considered internal links:
but won't be considered internal links the following links:
PHP 5.2 and later versions are supported.
WordPress 3.8 and later versions are supported.