Kill Your Orphans with AI for Better SEO; Link Whisper Review

A Wordpress plugin that automates internal linking for bloggers

I hate internal linking. As a longtime SEO and the owner of several niche websites, I know how important internal links are for search rankings. But let’s be real — combing through hundreds of old blog posts to manually add links is a pain in the butt.

That’s why many larger blogs — my own included — have lots of “orphan posts.” These are posts that have no internal links pointing to them. Orphan posts are a problem because they tend to get buried. Since no other posts on your blog link to them, Google rarely sees them when it crawls your site, and they’re unlikely to rank well.

Many SEO studies have shown that improving your internal linking by adding 1–10 links to each page on your blog can boost your rankings (and traffic) substantially. Some SEOs even believe internal linking is as powerful as external linking building. And it’s something over which you have complete control — you can add links to your own website whenever you want!

Unfortunately, most people don’t do it. Writers want to write, not spend hours linking pages together. That’s why I was excited to discover Link Whisper, a Wordpress plugin from Spencer Haws of Niche Pursuits, that uses AI and natural language processing to make internal linking super easy.

Here’s a look at Link Whisper and how I’m using it to boost my rankings by eliminating orphan posts on my niche websites.

How Link Whisper Works

Link Whisper is designed to make the process of internal linking more efficient and less time-consuming. The plugin uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to analyze your existing content and suggest relevant internal links.

Once you install Link Whisper on your WordPress site, it scans your entire content library and identifies orphan posts. It then provides you with a list of these posts along with suggestions for internal links that you can add to them.

One thing I like about Link Whisper is that the plugin’s AI is smart enough to recognize the context of your content and suggest links that are relevant and helpful. I’ve used tools like Yoast’s Internal Link Suggestions before, and they tend to suggest direct keyword matches.

If you write a post about tacos, for example, it tends to suggest linking from pages that also talk about tacos. That’s helpful, but Link Whisper’s AI takes things a step further. The plugin might suggest links to the taco page from posts about Mexican restaurants, or about street food.

Because its AI lets Link Whisper go beyond simple keyword matches, in my testing it suggested a more diverse and human-like set of pages as internal link sources.

A One-Click Process

Another thing I like about Link Whisper is that it turns internal linking into a one-click process. Even if you could magically identify all the posts that you wanted to link to an orphan page, actually going to each of those posts in Wordpress, editing them, and inserting the links would be annoying and time-consuming.

Link Whisper automates that. When you select an orphan post, you get a screen showing all the pages that could potentially link to it. Link Whisper even highlights suggested anchor text in the page. You then select the pages you want to link, and press a button. Link Whisper goes into each page, inserts the link, and publishes the updated page.

It’s a super simple process. There’s no mucking about with the Wordpress editor, searching for old posts, etc. You just check the boxes for the internal links you want, and Link Whisper goes through and adds them in.

How I Use Link Whisper

I use Link Whisper in two ways. When I first installed the plugin, it identified all the orphan posts on my site. On my niche site the Bay Area Telegraph, for example, I have 209 of them! Yikes!

I’ve been going through those a bit at a time and using Link Whisper to add internal links, which is slowly eliminating my orphan posts. I find the process kind of meditative — I often do it when I’m on a long Zoom meeting where I don’t need to be totally tuned in.

Over time, killing my orphan posts by adding internal links will not only elevate those posts’ rankings, but also make it easier for visitors to jump between relevant posts on my site, which increases time on page and thus advertising revenue.

Going forward, I also use Link Whisper to immediately add inbound links to every new post I publish. This prevents the problem of orphan posts in the first place. I find that Link Whisper’s link suggestions don’t work too well when I’m actually writing. It seems like I need to finish and publish the post first, before the plugin really finds useful potential links.

Luckily, the plugin makes that process easy. It adds a button for Add Inbound Link right to the Wordpress editor. As soon as I publish a post, I click that link, and add at least one internal link to the post right away. Tada — no more orphans!

I’ll also sometimes go through my Google Search Console data or Ahrefs and find posts that are ranking well, but aren’t in the top 3. I’ll then find those in the Wordpress editor, and add 3–10 internal links to the posts. That process helped my post about Walnut Creek parks move from the #5 slot on Google to the #3 slot.

Link Whisper Drawbacks

Although I’ve found Link Whisper incredibly helpful, it’s not perfect. Again, I don’t find that it works too well when it comes to adding links to a post you’re actively writing. For that, I still use Yoast’s Internal Linking Suggestions. I tend to use Link Whisper right after I hit publish.

I also found that for certain terms, Link Whisper suggests too many internal links. For example, nearly every post on the Bay Area Telegraph uses the term “Bay Area” somewhere in the text. At first, Link Whisper tried to link every post to every other one, based on that term. I got pages of link suggestions, all using Bay Area as the target keyword!

To fix that issue, I used the Excluded Words function on Link Whisper. I excluded terms that I use all the time, like Bay Area or San Francisco. After that fix, the system’s suggestions are much more relevant.

Link Whisper also works best on fairly large sites. If you only have 20 posts, there just won’t be too many posts to link together. The Bay Area Telegraph has over 400 posts and is tightly focused on one niche (the Bay Area), so there’s almost always a post I can link to anything new that I publish. But for smaller sites, that won’t be the case.

The biggest drawback of Link Whisper, though, is that it’s a Wordpress plugin. If you use any other CMS for your blog, you won’t be able to take advantage of the tool! I wish I could use Link Whisper to improve my internal linking here on Medium. But alas, it can’t handle non-Wordpress sites. I use Surfer instead, since it can recommend internal links on any site.

The Big Picture

Overall, Link Whisper is a fantastically helpful tool for bloggers. It’s also part of an important trend in AI.

Generative AI is hot right now; you can slap the “generative” label onto almost anything and 10x its value and sales. But as journalist Tom Davenport points out in Forbes, many companies are “missing the AI forest for the generative trees.”

Generative AI systems like ChatGPT are impressive and powerful. But there’s a whole world of AI tools out there that are quietly automating boring, repetitive aspects of creative work, thus freeing up creators to focus on the things that actually required skilled human input.

A tool that automates internal linking on Wordpress sites isn’t going to garner 100 million users in two months, as ChatGPT did. But for many people, such a tool might add just as much — or even more — value to their brand than splashy generative tech.

If you’re a creator, it’s important to stay up to date on new tech like ChatGPT and Midjourney. But it’s also essential not to overlook AI tools that fly under the radar, but are ultimately just as useful.

If you’re a Wordpress blogger, try Link Whisper out. Killing your orphan posts can provide a big boost to your SEO performance. And thanks to AI, it’s now something you can do in a couple of clicks.

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