For agencies

Fifty client sites, one linking standard

Internal linking is the kind of work that is easy to sell and hard to staff. It is not difficult, it does not need a senior, and it never ends — which is exactly why it slips off retainers and reappears in the next audit as a finding.

The problem is repetition, not difficulty

An audit finds the same four things on nearly every client site: money pages with two inbound internal links, an archive that links nowhere, anchors that say read more, and a handful of orphans left over from the last redesign.

Fixing that once is a day of work. Keeping it fixed while the client publishes twice a week is the part nobody budgets for. Multiply by the number of sites on the retainer and it stops being a task and becomes a staffing problem.

What scales is not doing the work faster. It is turning the decision into something that stays applied without anyone reopening the site.

What actually helps across many sites

Four things matter when the same person is responsible for more than one installation.

Rules travel as CSV. Every rule set exports and imports as a spreadsheet. That makes bulk edits possible in the tool your team already argues in, makes a migration a file transfer rather than an afternoon, and lets a proven pattern from one client become the starting point for the next. It also means a handover does not depend on anyone remembering what was configured.

Role permissions. Decide which user roles may see and change the rules. The client’s editors keep publishing as usual; the linking strategy stays with whoever is accountable for it. This is the setting that prevents the awkward call three months in.

Per-page limits and exclusions. A rule that is right for a 2,000-word guide is wrong for a 300-word news post. Caps per page keep density sane without per-post supervision, and the blacklist takes legal pages, landing pages and anything campaign-related out of the process entirely.

Licence tiers that assume more than one site. Licences run from a single site up to fifty, billed annually at a flat fee per tier, with no limit on links or pages and no credit counter. At the fifty-site tier that works out under ten dollars per site per year. The current tiers are on the pricing page. If a licence lapses, the links already placed stay as plain HTML and keep working — you lose Pro features and updates, not the work.

A workflow that survives a handover

One that works in practice, per client:

Crawl once and write down the targets. Which five to fifteen pages should collect authority. This is the only genuinely strategic step, and it is the one worth a senior’s hour.
Turn each target into two or three rules — several phrasings per page, so the anchor list stays varied rather than one phrase repeated across the archive.
Set the threshold and the cap so opening paragraphs stay readable and no page collects more links than it can carry.
Export the CSV into the client folder. That file is now the documentation. It answers “why does this enlace exist” without anyone opening WordPress.
Review quarterly against the crawl. Twenty minutes. New targets in, retired ones out.

The reason to keep the file rather than only the configuration: an agency loses this knowledge at staff changes, not at client changes. A CSV in the folder outlives the person who made it.

Where it will not help you

Worth saying plainly, because an agency finds out in week two either way.

It does not audit. It applies rules; it does not tell you which pages deserve them. That decision stays with you, and it is the part the client is paying for.
It does not find orphans. That is a crawler’s job — Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. The procedure is written up here.
There is no central dashboard across installations. Each site is configured on its own; the CSV is what moves between them. If you need one console governing fifty sites, this is not that product.
It is WordPress only. A client on Webflow or Shopify is out of scope.

Try it on one client first. The free version covers automatic keyword linking, per-page limits, the blacklist and CSV import and export — enough to run the whole workflow above on a single site and see whether the output reads like something a person wrote. The keyword threshold and partial matching, which are what keep it readable at volume, are in Pro.

Background reading for the strategic half: the complete guide to internal linking covers which pages deserve authority and why, and choosing anchor text covers the part clients notice.

See licence tiers