Links play a critical role in both website building and SEO ranking. Since managing your link with efficiency brings endless SEO advantages, marketers, of course, cannot take this for granted. There are 2 common types of link: internal and external.
Firstly, internal links lead to another page on the same site. Good internal links provide readers with a significant browsing experience, form proper information hierarchies of websites, and more. Internal links also let Google crawl your site and rank your content.
On the other hand, external links take readers to another website. They can increase the ranking of your site when other sites use them to guide readers to yours. The more external links to your page, the higher it will rank.
However, adding and managing links manually can be extremely exhausting when your site has hundreds of pages. Usually, it’s necessary to check and fix broken links, add a “nofollow” tag, or track your links’ statistics. It can be a hassle choosing an ultimate plugin to help you do such tasks sometimes.
Worry not! Check out this list of 6 WordPress link plugins we have made to help you manage your links effectively.
- #1 Prevent Direct Access Gold
- #2 Password Protect WordPress Pro
- #3 Pretty Links
- #4 Broken Link Checker
- #5 ThirstyAffiliates
- #6 External Links
- How to Fix a Broken Link
#1 Prevent Direct Access Gold
Prevent Direct Access Gold protects your files from being exposed to and indexed by Google. This plugin leads unauthorized users to a 404 error page when they try to access your files’ links. PDA Gold also makes site’s performance smoother by preventing content hotlinking.
These are PDA Gold’s notable link-related features:
File Protection: PDA supports protecting all types of file from images, documents, to audios and videos that you upload. Once they are secured, those files are accessible for administrators and authors only. PDA Gold will redirect unallowed users to a 404 Not Found page when attempting to exploit the URLs.
Auto-Generated Private URLs: PDA Gold will automatically establish private download links for you to access and share the protected files with others. You can copy and paste these links on your browsers and email by clicking the ‘Copy URL’ button. The plugin also allows you to expire the links by days and clicks.
Hotlinking Prevention: Hotlinking is when others link your media directly from your site to theirs. Since it significantly slows down your website, leave it for PDA Gold to handle.
#2 Password Protect WordPress Pro
When it comes to password protection plugins, Password Protect WordPress Pro stands out as the most solid representative. The plugin assists you in password protecting WordPress categories, posts, pages, partial content, WooCommerce products, or your entire website.
With PPWP Pro, you can establish a single password for multiple content or protect a single content with multiple passwords.
Furthermore, an important feature of PPWP Pro mostly revolves around what is called Quick Access Links (QALs). When users access protected pages and posts frequently, they will need the QALs.
QALs save users’ valuable time by not requiring them to enter passwords many times manually. Simply click the QALs and they can directly access the protected content without password requirements. Also, you can set the links’ expiry time and usage limit for better protection.
#3 Pretty Links
Pretty Links is one of the most useful WordPress links plugins. The plugin assists in creating simple URLs for you to redirect to any other URLs on your WordPress site. You can take your link clickers to available site content or an external link and share your links easily.
Pretty Links also offers a link shortener that helps you shorten the URLs of your WordPress posts and pages. With the help of this plugin, you can form beautiful links from long and messy affiliate links. Then you can share those shortened URLs in your email campaigns and platforms.
The plugin also provides a link tracking feature which tracks the URL clicks and reports on the traffic thoroughly.
#4 Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker is a free yet very effective WordPress links plugin in the market. The plugin scans and immediately fixes broken links and images found in your content. It also informs you exactly of the time it found the issues in your content.
In short, these are the outstanding features of Broken Link Checker:
- Scan and fix your WordPress posts, pages, comments, and custom fields.
- Search and filter by anchor texts or URLs.
- Directly edit links from the plugin’s page instead of the edit post page.
- Notify issues through the WordPress dashboard or via email.
- Prevent search engines such as Google from crawling broken links.
#5 ThirstyAffiliates
With a rating of 4.6/5 stars and 30,000 active installations, ThirstyAffiliates is undeniably a remarkable plugin. Here is a few benefits that ThirstyAffiliates can bring:
Easy Affiliate Links Management: ThirstyAffiliates lets you store your affiliate links in the most manageable place – the WordPress admin dashboard. It is not necessary to navigate to every single published post to locate and replace the affiliate links. You can go straight to the ThirstyAffiliate panel and update the links.
Link Cloaking: Bare links may be unpleasant, confusing and make visitors hesitate to click. ThirstyAffiliates “cloaks” your affiliate links, which means that the URLs appear prettier instead of being rawly unclear like normal.
Clear Redirection: The fact that ThirstyAffiliates provides a proper redirection system for your links, makes visitors navigate confidently on your site. They will know what they’re clicking on and tell affiliate links apart.
#6 External Links
To gain total control and configuration over your links, you should consider using External Links. After activating External Links, you can freely configure internal and external links in your WordPress admin dashboard. There is an icon that comes after the external links to indicate which links lead to other sites.
You can add a “nofollow” tag automatically to all the external links on your WordPress site. The tag, as its name tells, forces search engines not to follow and index your links, which avoids impact on SEO ranking.
How to Fix a Broken Link
Broken links are the links that do not work anymore. Accessing a broken link will eventually lead to a 404 Not Found page.
One of the causes of broken links is that the website owners have removed these pages. Furthermore, the server can serve a 404 not found error due to the relocation or changes in domain name.
Broken links occur because of the changes in the site’s permalink structure such as adding more elements. Typos could also make the link broken.
As a result, broken links can severely ruin the experience of your fellow web visitors. Bad experience definitely causes an increase in bounce rate and negatively affects SEOrankings.
Therefore, it is urgent to detect broken links and fix them as soon as possible. We’ve summarized and presented 4 simple ways to find and fix broken links to keep your site healthy. Check it out!
Have You Decided Your WordPress Link Plugin Yet?
Because links are crucial in satisfying users and elevating SEO ranking, it is important to manage them carefully. In the market, developers have made tons of plugins to help you do so. Now, with our 6 WordPress links plugins listed above, why don’t you start figuring out what plugin suits you?
Do you have any difficulty with the WordPress links plugins that need solving? Please let us know in the comment section below!
