What to Look for in a WordPress Internal Linking Plugin
A search for "WordPress internal linking plugin" turns up a handful of options, and a feature-by-feature spreadsheet comparing them goes stale the moment any one of them ships an update. What holds up better is a checklist of the questions worth asking about any tool in this category, including this one. Everything on it maps to a problem this series has already covered in detail, so treat it as a summary you can hold any candidate up against.
Does it rank by relevance, or just match keywords?
Some tools suggest links based on shared tags or categories, which is a coarse signal at best. Others compare the actual meaning of your content and rank suggestions by how relevant they genuinely are. The difference shows up immediately: a tag-based tool tends to surface obvious, low-value matches, while a relevance-ranked one surfaces the links you would have had to remember yourself.
Does it help you avoid overlinking?
A tool that just maximizes the number of links it can find will happily suggest more than a post can reasonably hold. Look for one that surfaces a manageable, genuinely relevant shortlist rather than an exhaustive dump, and gives you a sense of when you have enough. See our piece on overlinking and link density for why this matters more than raw link count.
Does it surface orphan pages?
Suggesting links for the post you happen to be editing right now is the easy half of the problem. The harder, more valuable half is surfacing your older posts that nothing links to at all, since those are the ones actively losing search visibility in the background. See our guide to orphan pages for why this is worth checking a tool actually does.
Does it encourage varied, descriptive anchor text?
A tool that always proposes the exact same anchor phrase for a given target page is optimizing for its own convenience, not for natural-reading content. Our guide to anchor text covers what good anchor text actually looks like, and it's a reasonable thing to check a candidate tool against directly.
Does it catch broken links, or only add new ones?
A tool focused purely on adding new links leaves an entire category of problems untouched: dead links, redirect chains, and slugs that changed without anything downstream being updated. See our article on broken links and redirect chains for why this is worth checking for separately from link suggestions.
Where does the heavy processing happen?
Comparing every post against every other post is genuinely expensive computation. Some tools run that work directly against your WordPress database on your own server; others send only the metadata needed for matching to a separate backend and keep your server's own resources free for serving actual visitors. Our article on why internal link plugins slow down WordPress goes into why this matters more as your content library grows.
Can you audit what already exists, not just add more?
A tool that only helps with new posts going forward leaves your entire back catalog unexamined. Being able to see which posts already attract the most links, which have none, and which links are broken, across your whole site rather than one post at a time, is a meaningfully different capability from per-post suggestions. Our guide to internal link auditing covers what a proper audit should surface.
Where OrdoLink fits against this checklist
We built OrdoLink around these exact questions, which is probably not a surprise given we wrote the checklist: relevance ranking rather than tag matching, an on-demand link health check for broken links and redirects, a dashboard showing which posts already attract the most links, and off-site processing so the matching work doesn't run against your own database. Take that as a disclosed bias rather than a conclusion; the point of a checklist is that you can hold any tool, including this one, up against it yourself.