Ferric Links - Non-Destructive Internal Linking

Ferric Links adds internal links to your site 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frozen URL: if you later change the target's slug, the link uses the new permalink automatically, and if the target is unpublished or deleted, the link is simply not rendered instead of returning a 404.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• Self-healing links - links resolve to the target's current permalink, so slug changes do not break them; unpublished targets are skipped.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.

1.29.2

• Standardized all PHP identifiers on the unique linkforge prefix.

1.29.1

• Category and tag archive targets are now part of the free version.
• The per-type link matrix control no longer ships in the free version.

1.29.0

• Plugin renamed to Ferric Links.
• Whole-site link suggestions and one-click bulk add are now part of the free version.
• Admin scripts are now enqueued via the WordPress APIs.

1.28.0

• Free version no longer contains any Pro code (it now ships only what it does) and the free rule limit is removed - unlimited auto-link rules for everyone.

1.27.0

• Hardening release ahead of launch: a full security, performance and correctness audit, with every finding fixed.
• Committed content and its backup now survive backslashes intact (proper slashing on save and revert).
• Pages where the plugin changes nothing are served byte-for-byte untouched (no more HTML re-serialization on unmodified pages).
• Content containing a stray closing tag can no longer be truncated by the linker - it is served unmodified instead.
• Adding, editing or toggling a rule now purges your page cache so the change is visible immediately.
• Non-Latin (Cyrillic, Greek, accented) keywords now match reliably regardless of letter case.
• After one keyword is linked in a paragraph, later keywords in the same paragraph still get their chance.
• Click data is pruned automatically after 180 days (filterable) and the public click endpoint is rate-limited.
• Faster admin screens: cached-only list-table columns, fewer queries per scan, an index on click sources.
• CSV exports harden every cell against spreadsheet formula injection.

1.26.0

• Keyword Map with cannibalization report and CSV export (reads focus keywords from Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO and SEOPress).
• Commit to Content: optionally bake auto-links into your posts, with a backup and one-click revert, so links survive uninstall.
• Per-link rel (nofollow / sponsored / ugc) and hidden auto-expiry for external links, with an exact cache purge on expiry.
• Optional bring-your-own-key Claude (Anthropic) for anchor-text suggestions and per-language keyword translation.
• Richer dashboard with a one-click full-site scan and setup, plus a guided tour.
• Saved reports (no re-scan on every visit) and per-report timestamps.

1.11.2

• Self-healing links: links resolve to a target's live URL, so slug changes never break them and deleted targets drop cleanly.
• Multilingual (WPML/Polylang) language-aware target resolution.
• Topical clusters with per-cluster "build the missing links" suggestions.
• Optional bring-your-own-key AI semantic matching (OpenAI/Google/Voyage).
• Click tracking, external-links-by-domain report, CSV import/export, ignore list.
• Clean uninstall that removes all plugin data.

1.0.0

• Initial release: non-destructive render-time auto-linking, orphan finder, internal-links and broken-link reports, list-table columns.