Can You Add Links to Your WordPress Blog Posts Automatically?

Links are undeniably important for a healthy website. You need internal links to keep users circulating through content on your site and to interlink related posts to show deeper coverage of the topics you write about. You also need external links, whether it’s to cite sources, reference other works, or just give people further reading on topics you don’t want to cover in detail.

The trouble is that linking can often be a pain. Unless you have a specific phase in your editorial process where you go through and add links, it can be tricky to keep it consistent. I know I still forget to add links sometimes, and have to go back and add them later, or don’t add as many as I want, or just miss good linking opportunities.

If you’re anything like me, you probably think it would be cool to have some kind of automated way to insert links so you don’t have to think about it. But, there are a few questions that come to mind.

• Is it possible to add links automatically?
• Can it hurt your SEO if you add links automatically?
• Is it a good idea to add links automatically?

I figured it was worth a look, so I did some digging. There’s good news and bad news, so let’s dig right in and talk about it.

Is it Possible to Add Links to WordPress Posts Automatically?

First up, let’s talk about the technical limitations and possibilities.

Technologically, there’s nothing stopping you from adding links automatically. All you would need is a plugin with a script that:

• Finds a relevant keyword in your post that can serve as an anchor.
• Finds a relevant webpage to link to using the keyword as an anchor.
• Injects the link.

You would want some sanity checks and probably some filters on it, so you don’t end up linking every noun in every post and ending up with hundreds of links in a blog post, and so you don’t repeatedly link to competitors, but there’s nothing impossible about it.

One thing you need to consider, though, is when this injection happens. I’ve seen two different options: a plugin for your blog editor that injects links the way any link would be added to a WordPress post and a plugin for your website that injects links dynamically to users.

The first can be found pretty easily (with a caveat I’ll get to in a minute) using plugins like Link Whisper.

Link Whisper crawls your content and builds an index of the topics you cover. It also monitors your content, and when you’re in a post editor, it looks for places where you mention a topic you’ve covered elsewhere. When it finds one of those opportunities, it tells you about it, and you can click a button to inject the link.

The second is more the domain of advertising. A primary example is InfoLinks. They’re a display ad and referral link advertiser with a script a publisher can add to their site. That script scans a page, looks for keywords that match advertisers in their active roster, and injects links for viewers to see. If viewers click those links, the publisher gets paid.

Why a Post-Script Isn’t a Good Idea

That second form of link injection, which I’m calling a post-script because it’s a script that adds links post-publication, isn’t ideal.

Oh, it’s fine for monetization. Ads are meant to be dynamic. Google isn’t going to punish you for using InfoLinks. If they did, InfoLinks wouldn’t still survive.

But, if you were to use a similar script to add external, non-monetized links, it wouldn’t do much for you. Users could see those links, but Google generally will ignore them. Google doesn’t care much for dynamically-inserted content, and in some cases, they don’t even render them. The script might not be executed by the web crawler that indexes your site.

Effectively, those links don’t exist as far as SEO is concerned. And, since organic links are all about SEO value, that means this post-hoc method doesn’t do you any good. Stick to methods that insert links at the post editor level.

Automatic Internal vs. External Links

One of the other issues you’ll run into with automatic link injection is internal links versus external links. There’s a reason why I picked Link Whisper and InfoLinks as my examples above.

Link Whisper is a very effective tool for adding internal links to your blog posts. But it doesn’t do external links.

There’s a big reason for that, and it’s access to data.

Internal links are easy for a plugin to manage. It just has to scan your existing website’s content, which it can easily do with the access you give it when you install it on your blog.

External links require some form of external database of content.

Now, a plugin could have its own database of links, but then the company making it would have to maintain an index of links and their content, and that’s a huge amount of work. It would also be biased towards whatever sites the company added to the database and would be very limited based on how much computing power the company has to throw at it. Remember that companies like Ahrefs have gaps and limitations in their coverage, and they have an immense amount of data and tech to throw at the problem.

The simple answer is to just have the plugin search Google and pull the top result. That’s the lightest-weight version of an external link finder, but would it be ideal?

I think it has issues. For one thing, you never know what kind of site it’s going to link to. Sometimes, it’ll be a relevant blog post; other times, it might be a product page link, a plugin page link, or even something moderately irrelevant. We all know how much trouble you can have finding something relevant from Google these days.

You could get around this the same way Link Whisper does, by requiring manual confirmation of each link you inject, but at that point, all you’re speeding up is the process of doing a single Google search, and is that really impactful?

You also might run the risk of your plugin running too many searches and Google deciding to force Captchas on you, rate limiting you, or otherwise hindering your ability to use it. A small issue on top of the others, but an important one to keep in mind.

All of that said, you could do all of this if you really wanted. I’m not aware of any existing plugins that do it, but with modern programming tools – from hiring a freelancer to asking ChatGPT for code you hope you can trust – it wouldn’t actually be too hard to set up. So why doesn’t it exist? That’s another story entirely.

Can Automatic Link Plugins Hurt Your SEO?

Talking about the SEO implications is always important for anything you do automatically, especially if it involves links.

Will injecting links automatically hurt your SEO? The answer is “maybe” and “it depends”, based on the way you do it, and the links you add.

Pop quiz: what’s the difference between a link added manually and a link added by Link Whisper?

Answer: Nothing, as far as Google is concerned. They can’t tell at all how your links were added to the content if they were added in the post editor. They can tell when links come from plugins after the fact, like InfoLinks, and they can tell when links come from plugins like Related Post plugins because they have their own box. Similarly, they can tell when links are added by ad networks like Outbrain for similar reasons.

And, as I already mentioned, links added by scripts after the fact – especially if they change depending on the user, like ad network injected links – are either not rendered by Google, ignored by Google, or could offer a very small penalty if they add up to too much ad density.

That leaves us with just the links themselves. Can adding the wrong links to your posts hurt you?

Sometimes, yeah.

Most of the time, it comes down to a combination of the number of links, the quality of the links, and your overall link profile.

Google is keenly aware that links are important to SEO, and they’re extremely aware that links have been abused in a thousand different ways over the years.

They have a lot of filters in place to look for signs of that abuse, and if you aren’t careful, it’s always possible you can end up looking like an abusive site.

Evaluating a site you’re linking to is an important part of external linking. A lot of us don’t think of it actively anymore, because we have an awareness of what makes a good link, and don’t really even think about linking to a bad site.

But, if you have an automatic link injection plugin, you aren’t giving it that much attention. So, what happens if the link you inject:

• Is a spam site with a thin veneer of quality?
• Is part of a PBN?
• Is actually a soft 404, but you didn’t look beyond the title?
• Is the same site you’ve linked to dozens of times throughout your site?
• Is irrelevant to your actual keyword because of synonyms or mis-Googling?

All of these are potential signs of spam, participating in link schemes or paid links, or other abuse.

Sure, you can try to programmatically remove some of this from the plugin, and the fact that you’d be pulling links from Google results means others aren’t going to be a problem.

All in all, it’s a lot of work to automate something to save you a couple of seconds here and there.

Is an Automatic Link Injection Plugin a Good Idea?

This is where we come to my personal recommendations. You can basically sum it up as “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

Any post-publication addition of links should be done with caution. Things like InfoLinks and a Related Posts Plugin are generally fine, though even InfoLinks can cause issues for unrelated reasons (like people who bounce when they see it, the hit to your user experience, and the potential loss of trust in all of your links.)

Links added before publication aren’t going to hurt your SEO in the sense of whether they were automatic or manual. Google can’t tell. So, it all comes down to the quality and relevance of those links.

When it comes to internal links, I find it fine to use something like Link Whisper. I’ve used it myself. It’s handy, it does what it claims to do, and it gives you enough manual control that you don’t have to worry about hurting your site with it as long as you’re careful.

For external links, I don’t think it helps much to use any sort of automation for them, and evidently, neither does anyone else. If there was a viable market for it, there would be a few competing plugins offering it already, right?

Evaluating the sites and content you link to on sites other than your own is too important to be left to a plugin, in my opinion. Even if all it does is give you suggestions, it comes with enough caveats that you aren’t actually saving yourself any time or effort. You might as well just install a plugin that adds a banner saying “add more external links” as a reminder.

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