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Using “Auto-links” you can link to a URL of your choice any time a given keyword is mentioned on your site. So, if you want to link to a certain page every time the phrase “best survival knife” is mentioned, you can make that happen automatically in the auto-linking feature.
The will not only link from any past mentions of the phrase, but will also automatically add a link any time you mention the keyword phrase in the future.
Controlling link insertion
The Auto-Linking feature comes equipped with powerful settings to give you greater control over when and where Auto-Links are to be inserted.
The settings are:
- Add link if post already has this link?
- Only link once per post.
- Override “One Link per Sentence” rule?
- Select links before inserting?
- Set priority for auto link insertion?
- Only add links to posts published after the given date.
- Make Keyword search case sensitive
- Restrict autolinks to specific categories?
Add link if post already has this link?
Checking this setting will tell Link Whisper to insert Auto-Links into posts that already have links pointing to the Auto-Link’s url.
By default, if you created an Auto-Link with the URL of “https://example.com/tutorials”, and a post already has a link with that URL, Link Whisper won’t insert the Auto-Link. If this is checked, Link Whisper will insert the Auto-Link in the post.
One word of caution, checking this without checking “Only link once per post” will cause the auto linking feature to insert links every time it finds a keyword in a post. So if a post has a Keyword that shows up 4 times and “Only link once per post” isn’t checked, the Auto-Link will be inserted 4 times.
Only link once per post.
Checking this will tell Link Whisper to make sure that the Auto-Link is only inserted once per post. This option is checked by default on all new Auto-Links.
If “Add link if post already has this link” is active as well, it makes sure that this Auto-Link is inserted once even if a manually inserted link with the same URL is present in the post.
Override “One Link per Sentence” rule?
Checking this will force Link Whisper to allow autolinks to be added more than once to a sentence.
By default, Link Whisper only inserts one link per sentence, so if a sentence already has a link, Link Whisper won’t add another one to it. If this is checked, this behavior will be overidden.
Select links before inserting?
Checking this will allow you to pick which Auto-Links are inserted into posts. Link Whisper will store the possible links in a separate column in the Auto-Linking page so you can easily pick which links are inserted.
Set priority for auto link insertion?
Checking this will allow you to set a priority for Auto-Link insertion.
What can happen sometimes is Link Whisper will find a sentence that could have two Auto-Links inserted into it. And ordinarily, Link Whisper will randomly pick which one of the two links are inserted in the sentence. But sometimes there’s a link that you always want to insert if the possibility exists. By setting a priority level for the Auto-Link, you can tell Link Whisper how important an Auto-Link is and it will always insert the most important one.
By default, all Auto-Links have a priority of 0, so they’re all on the same level and no Auto-Link has preference.
After checking this option you’ll be shown a priority setting input so you can set the priority for the Auto-Link. Auto Links with higher numbers have a higher priority.
Only add links to posts published after the given date.
Checking this will allow you to tell Link Whisper to only insert Auto-Link into posts published after a given date. After checking this option, a date selector will be shown so you can select the date.
Make Keyword search case sensitive
Checking this will allow you to force Link Whisper to do case sensitive searches for keywords.
Restrict auto links to specific categories?
Checking this will tell Link Whisper to only insert Auto-Links in posts that are in categories that you specify. To select the categories that you want to restrict the Auto-Links to, click on the blue triangle to show a list of the available categories and select the categories.
How the settings apply to each Keyword-Link rule
The settings are set for each Keyword-Link rule individually, so you can have different settings for each rule. The settings that appear when you click the large gear icon are the settings that will be applied to new Keyword-Link rules that you create in the future and don’t affect the existing Keyword-Link rule settings.
To change the settings for existing Keyword-Link rules, you have to click on the small gear next to the Keyword for the rule you want to update.
Reasons why links won’t be created
By default, Auto-Links will not be inserted into posts that already contain the link. Auto-Links also won’t be inserted into post types that aren’t selected in the Link Whisper Settings.
You can find a more exhaustive list of reasons why Auto-Links won’t be inserted in this article.