Backlinks Taxonomy

This plugin is a minimalist backlink tracker. It keeps track of all internal links between posts using taxonomies.

The plugin maintains a taxonomy of which posts links to which. The taxonomy is mostly invisible, but available through REST.

The backlink taxonomy is updated automatically whenever a post is published, scheduled or later updated. By registering the outgoing links of all posts it is easy to find the incoming links.

User Interface

The plugin most works behind the scenes, scanning posts for internal links whenever the posts are updated.

The backlink taxonomy is available for the Query Loop block, which can be used to create a dynamic “What links here” block.

The backlink_count taxonomy can be used to filter the displayed posts on the posts lists of the admin interface. This is a handy way of finding posts with no or few incoming links.

The admin posts list has a “Suggest Backlinks” added for each row, which will find posts with shared tags and categories, that are not already linked from the post. If there are shared custom taxonomies, they will be used too.

The admin posts list also has a ‘Backlinks’ column available, showing the number of backlinks for the post. Clicking on the column will show a list of the backlinks. The column is sortable. The column also shows the number of outgoing links, also clickable.

A management page under the Tools menu can show the backlinks status of all posts, with columns for incoming and outgoing links, and commands for rescanning or ‘un-scanning’ posts.

The settings pages is rather basic, but allows the setting of post types to operate on (default posts and pages), and post statuses to select on (default published and scheduled).

Please note that any later changes to these parameters will most likely require a manual rescan of newly included post, either using the management page or the WP-CLI ‘wp backlinks rescan’ command.

The Backlinks Taxonomy plugin works with custom post types, and will use available custom taxonomies for backlink suggestions.

WP-CLI interface

The plugin adds a WP-CLI command ‘backlinks’ with several sub-commands.

There are commands to:

• show all outgoing and incoming links for a single post;
• find backlink suggestions for a single post;
• show the overall status of the backlink counters;
• rescan individual posts for links;
• list all unscanned posts.