Ferric Links – Non-Destructive Internal Linking

Ferric Links is an internal linking plugin for WordPress that adds links at render time, when a page is served. It never writes links into your stored post content: each link comes from a rule (a keyword mapped to a target page) that you can edit or turn off at any time, and your posts stay exactly as you wrote them.

Because links are resolved when the page renders, they follow their target. A rule points at a page, not at a frozen URL: if you later change the target’s slug, the link uses the new permalink automatically, and if the target is unpublished or deleted, the link is simply not rendered instead of returning a 404. Deactivating or deleting the plugin removes all rendered links and leaves no markup behind, because nothing was ever written into your content.

How to use it

1. Open Ferric Links in the admin menu and add a rule: a keyword or phrase, and the page it should link to. The keyword is linked wherever it appears (within the per-page limits you set).
2. Press Scan my site & set up on the Dashboard. One scan builds the internal-links report, the orphan list, and the whole-site suggestion list.
3. Review the Suggestions tab: it lists phrases on your pages that match another page’s title or topic wording, each addable as a rule with one click – individually, selected in bulk, or all at once.
4. Use the Orphans tab to find pages with no inbound internal links, and the one-click fixer to create an inbound link from a page that already mentions them.
5. In the editor, the Link Opportunities panel shows outbound and inbound link suggestions for the post you are writing.

Settings let you cap the number of auto-links per page, skip headings, the first paragraph, and theme title bars, choose which post types are linked, open links in a new tab, and link content stored in custom fields (Advanced Custom Fields, Meta Box, Pods, Toolset, JetEngine).

Free features

• Render-time auto-linking – keyword-to-page rules applied when a page is served; stored content is never modified. Unlimited rules.
• Self-healing links – links resolve to the target’s current permalink, so slug changes do not break them; unpublished targets are skipped.
• Category & tag targets – rules can point at category and tag archives, not just posts and pages.
• Whole-site link suggestions with bulk add – one scan lists missing internal links across your content; add them one at a time or all at once.
• Editor suggestions – outbound and inbound link opportunities for the post being edited, in a meta box and an editor panel.
• Orphan finder – pages with no inbound internal links, with a one-click inbound-link fixer.
• Internal links report – inbound and outbound counts for every page, saved between visits.
• Broken internal link checker – checks your internal links and lists any that return an error.
• Posts & Pages columns – inbound/outbound link counts in the admin list tables.
• Performance: rules are cached, a plain-text keyword check runs before any HTML processing, and reports are built in the admin, never on visitor requests.

Pro features

• Related pages in the editor – suggestions matched by topic similarity, so related pages are found even without an exact phrase match.
• Topical clusters – pages grouped by topic, with per-cluster interlinking stats and suggested links between cluster members.
• Keyword Map – each page’s focus keyword (read from Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO, or SEOPress) with duplicate-keyword (cannibalization) detection and CSV export.
• Click tracking – records clicks on internal links via a small front-end beacon and reports the most-clicked destinations and sources.
• External link management – per-link rel attributes (nofollow / sponsored / ugc), an optional auto-disable date, external-links-by-domain and broken-external-link reports.
• Commit to Content – optionally write the current auto-links into your posts, with a per-post backup and one-click revert.
• CSV import / export of rules, an ignore list, and per-page target keywords.
• Multilingual (WPML & Polylang) – links point to the current language’s translation of the target, with per-language keyword variants.
• Optional AI matching – bring your own OpenAI, Google, or Voyage API key for embedding-based related-page matching, and your own Anthropic key for anchor-text suggestions and keyword translation. All AI features are optional and billed to your own account; the default engine runs locally without them.

External services

Ferric Links works entirely on your own server by default and makes no external requests. Two optional features contact third-party services, and only when you explicitly enable them and provide your own API key:

AI semantic matching (optional, Pro). If you enable „Use my own AI provider“ in Settings, Ferric Links sends the text of your posts and pages to the embeddings provider you choose – OpenAI, Google, or Voyage AI – to generate meaning-based link suggestions. Requests are sent only when you run a suggestion scan, using your own API key, billed to your own account.

AI anchor text and keyword translation (optional, Pro). If you enable „Use my Claude key“ in Settings, Ferric Links sends a target page’s title and a short excerpt to Anthropic (Claude) to suggest anchor text, and sends individual keyword phrases to Anthropic to translate them. Requests are sent only when you click „Suggest anchors“ or „Translate keywords“, using your own API key, billed to your own account.

Neither feature is enabled by default, and Ferric Links runs no cloud service of its own in between – your data goes directly from your site to the provider you chose. See each provider’s terms and privacy policy:

• OpenAI – https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use and https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
• Google (Gemini API) – https://ai.google.dev/terms and https://policies.google.com/privacy
• Voyage AI – https://www.voyageai.com/tos and https://www.voyageai.com/privacy
• Anthropic (Claude) – https://www.anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms and https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy

Licensing, updates and optional telemetry (Freemius). Ferric Links uses the Freemius SDK for secure update delivery and (in the paid version) licensing. On first activation you are shown an explicit opt-in screen; only if you choose to opt in, basic diagnostics (site URL, WordPress and PHP versions, and your email for update notices) are sent to Freemius (freemius.com). Skipping the opt-in keeps the plugin fully functional. See https://freemius.com/terms/ and https://freemius.com/privacy/

The optional broken-external-link checker sends a request to each outbound URL already present in your own content, to check whether it still responds. This contacts the sites you link to, not any Ferric Links service.