Link Whisper is a one-of-a-kind WordPress plugin that I came across this year. I wrote about it in a tutorial before showing you how easy it is to optimize your internal link structure between your WordPress posts using it.
Internal link building is a strategy that is overlooked by many beginners. In the phase of your blog when you don’t have a good profile of backlinks, you can utilize the power of internal links to rank your pages. It’s a super stable way to create an inbound link profile making your whole blog and website easily navigatable and easy to crawl.
Internal links help Google to understand the context of your blog posts and are super important for on-page SEO. They pass link juice between your pages and make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl and index.
When you link two or more relevant pages to each other, it establishes a hierarchy and a cluster of the topic, which is amazingly helpful for ranking your pages on multiple keyword results.
I’ve been using Link Whisper for over 4 months now. I’ve got to say that it is the most database friendly internal linking automation plugin.
In this review, I’ll show you the in-depth features of Link Whisper, how it is going to help you save a lot of time and make your internal link building strategy easy.
What is Link Whisper
Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin that helps you interlink your blog posts based on Artificial Intelligence backed scans.
It scans your whole blog in the initial setup, and every time you update a blog post. When the scan is complete, Link Whisper suggests you relevant blog posts that can be linked to.
Not only that, but it also shows you the text to which the suggested blog post can be linked.
Here’s how the suggestions look:
By clicking on the checkbox located beside the Sentences you can choose to add the link to the suggested post. The posts will be linked with the suggested anchor text.
The anchor text is customizable so you can choose to add or delete the words by clicking on the sentences themselves.
Features
Here are a few features that’ll help you save time as well as eliminate the guesswork of internal linking.
1. AI-Powered Internal Link Suggestion
There are not many WordPress plugins that utilize the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). LInk Whisper is one of the few plugins that do it beautifully.
It works on a simple ever-learning algorithm that analyzes your blog posts as you start writing. It then shows you all the link suggestions in real-time and you can add links with a single click.
The first scan is complete the moment you install and activate the Link Whisper plugin. After the initial scan, periodic scans keep happening to make sure your link suggestions are up to date.
2. Link Reporting
Link Whisper will also help you to analyze how many internal links each post has. It also shows you how many inbound links are coming to the article and how many outbound links are present in it.
You can access these reports by clicking on Link Whisper icon in your WordPress dashboard’s sidebar and select reports:
The detailed reports dashboard shows you the exact number of:
- Inbound internal links
- Outbound internal links
- Outbound external links
Inbound links are the general internal links that are pointing towards the blog post.
Outbound internal links are those internal links that redirecting to an external link that goes to another domain. If you use a link cloaking plugin like Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates, you’ll see them in the Outbound internal links column.
Outbound external links are general internal links that point to an external website on a different domain. Both no-follow and do-follow.
3. Add Internal Links Collectively
Link Whisper also allows you to add internal links in bulk.
To do that, go to the reports dashboard and click on the “Add” link. It will show you all of the blog posts that have relevant content to add an internal link to the selected post.
Click on the checkbox beside the blog posts and hit save to add the internal links. It’s that simple.
If you wish to add or remove a word from the suggested anchor text, click on the word in the sentence.
It makes it super easy to add internal links to orphan pages and new blog posts. Orphan pages are those pages on your website that don’t have any internal links pointing towards them.
As it is a plug and play plugin, you don’t have to go through any configuration setup. You can install and let the Link Whisper scan your blog posts for about 5 minutes before it starts giving you smart links suggestions.
If your blog is pretty big, and you have thousands of blog posts, it may take anywhere from 5-10 minutes for the initial scan to complete. After that, it will perform all the scans in the background when your servers are not busy.
This also means it is a lightweight plugin. You can use it on shared hosting servers without worrying about database or server outrage.
The internal link suggestions are not limited to blog posts. You can enable custom post types as well as pages and attachments to be suggested for internal links.
To enable custom posts and pages, you’ll find an option in Link Whisper settings:
You can also set the words to be ignored on the same page. Words you put in this field will be excluded from the anchor text suggestions.
There’s also an option to ignore numbers and open the links in a new tab.
Auto Link
With a recent update, Link Whisper added a new feature called Auto Link.
Using Auto Link you can automate internal and external linking pretty easily. It adds an option to automatically link to a URL of your choice every time a specific keyword is mentioned anywhere on your posts or pages.
There are a couple of settings for how auto-link functions. Such as:
- Add one link per post (I highly recommend to activate this)
- Don’t add a link if a post/page already links to the URL
It is a nice feature to automate internal linking and would help you save a decent time over the years. I would like to see an option to add “rel=” tags in the Auto links. That way we can use it for affiliate links as well.
There is a new URL changer feature as well. It adds the ability to change a particular link using a 301 redirect. It has a clean report section where you can check all the links you’ve changed.
Then comes the option to ignore suggested links so that the link whisper suggestions will never suggest them again. You can let the plugin know which pages and posts you never want to link.
Target Keyword
The new update to Link Whisper allows you to set target keywords for blog posts and pages. But what do these target keywords mean?
You can set a target keyword for a blog post that you are trying to rank on Google SERPs. By telling Link Whisper that this is the keyword you want this page to rank for, the plugin will show the internal link suggestions that mention those target keywords (or variations) first.
This will ensure the internal links that are likely to have higher authority are more often found and suggested.
Google Search Console Integration
Link Whisper can integrate with your Google search console account and pull keywords from your search console reports. This means the keywords you’re already ranking for on second or higher SERPs will be taken into account by Link Whisper.
You can then choose to add internal links using these keywords to get higher rankings. I mean, this is exactly what we need. The most underutilized strategy is adding internal links using keywords you’re already ranking for.
Not only that, but it also shows the CTR, position, impression, and clicks data for the target keyword. To connect your Link Whisper account with your Google Search Console, go to the Link Whisper plugin settings and click on authorize.
If you already have Yoast SEO or Rank Math plugins installed, Link Whisper will automatically pull in your target keywords and will set those as active target keywords.
What Happens If You Remove The Link Whisper Plugin?
Your links will stay intact. If you uninstall Link Whisper, the links you add will remain as it is.
All of the links are permanent, and there’s no way to delete them in bulk, as of now.
You can uninstall the plugin anytime without worrying about SEO or breaking the links.
Pricing
Link Whisper is a premium plugin. It doesn’t have any free version or free trial.
There are three-yearly plans, and each plan gives you access to all core features.
Its pricing starts from $77/year for a single site license. If you have more than one site, you can choose the $107/year plan for three sites.
There’s also a $157/year plan for ten sites.
In terms of pricing, it might seem a little expensive at first.
However, when you look at it from a different perspective, it seems justified. You should think about the long term benefits of Link Whisper. It will help you save time as well as improve your on-page SEO without much hassle.
You’ll have to purchase the Link Whisper plugin to download and install it. You’ll receive a license key on your email, or you can copy it from your account dashboard.
There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee. In case you didn’t like the plugin, you can ask for a full refund via support email.
Support
I haven’t had any chance to check the support speed and quality myself.
The plugin comes with a complete documentation library and a walkthrough series of video tutorials. So, there’s not much to worry about setup and configuration.
If you do want to ask a question in case the plugin on your WordPress installation is not working, you can reach the support team via email.
They use the traditional ticket support system. Link Whisper support does have a knowledge base with all the Link Whisper troubleshooting guides as well.
As far as I’ve experienced, my pre-sale emails were answered within 3 hours, which I consider to be decent.
Conclusion
Overall, Link Whisper seems to be a solid plugin and has fantastic possibilities in the future. They’ve recently added a new reporting dashboard for broken links and redirects as well.
These are the kind of plugins I love to write and use the most. The problem solvers.
I prefer to use it over other interlink plugins since Link Whisper has much better features, relevant suggestions and more control over linked articles.
Try Link Whisper, and you’ll understand how useful and time saving it is.
If you have any questions, let me know it in the comments below.
Hello, Aayush
Thank you for sharing a review about link whisper plugin. I was looking for the best internal linking plugin that works on artificial intelligence.
Manually it takes lots of time to interlink pages for SEO.
Indeed, It saves a lot of time & improves user engagement.
Its a nice plugin, but we need to go for Pro version for getting auto links enabled.
Link whisper is one of its kind. It have saved me a lot of stress and time.
The plugin is absolutely great! I’ve been using Link whisper on my site since September and it’s already paying off. I hope they continue working on it and improving it as they are some things that can be improved, but all in all, it’s worth it.
It surely is.
Hello, Aayush I want to know if there are any free plugins for set interlinking on my website? I read this blog it’s very informative.
Hi Luish,
Link Whisper has a free version.