There’s a reason why WPBeginner makes internal linking a habit.
By carefully placing links within our articles, we help our readers find related and interesting content. These links also have a big impact on our SEO by helping search engines such as Google to find and index all our WordPress content.
However, managing links can take a lot of time, especially as your website grows. Plus, you need to think about external or outbound links, too!
In this Slim SEO Link Manager review, we’re deep diving into a plugin that aims to simplify inbound and outbound link management. It comes with built-in reports, link health monitoring, automatic link suggestions, and other features that may improve your SEO and the user experience, without a ton of extra effort.
Is it the right link management plugin for you? Let’s find out, in this detailed Slim SEO Link Manager review.
Slim SEO Link Manager Review: Why Use It in WordPress?
Slim SEO Link Manager helps manage your site’s internal and outbound links. To start, it monitors all the links across your entire website and creates several detailed reports that you can access directly in the WordPress dashboard.
These reports display the internal and external content you link to the most, so you can optimize your posts for SEO. Some reports can also help you identify problems such as broken links, redirects, and orphaned pages, so you can troubleshoot and fix errors before they damage the visitor experience or hurt your SEO.
Even better, Slim SEO Link Manager will try to fix common problems for you. For example, if you update a post’s slug then Slim SEO will automatically find and update all the places where you use that link.
Going further, Slim SEO Link Manager integrates seamlessly with the WordPress block editor and will suggest relevant posts you may want to link to.
In this way, you can improve your internal linking while saving a ton of time, since you don’t need to search for related posts yourself.
Slim SEO Link Manager Review: Is It the Right Linking Plugin for You?
Links are an important part of any website, but manually adding and maintaining these URLs can take a lot of time and effort. This problem only gets bigger as your website grows and you keep adding more content, plus more inbound and outbound links.
So, can a WordPress plugin solve this problem? Let’s find out, in this detailed Slim SEO Link Manager review.
1. Easy to Set Up and Use
It’s easy to get started with Slim SEO Link Manager. To start, you can install and activate it just like any other WordPress plugin.
With that done, simply click on the ‘Scan now’ button.
Slim SEO Link Manager will then scan your entire WordPress blog, website, or online store and create various link reports. This lets you see all your internal and external links at a glance, and spot any problems you need to address.
2. Optimized for Performance
Monitoring all the links across your entire website can take a lot of processing power, especially if you have many different posts.
To avoid putting pressure on your server or WordPress hosting, Slim SEO Link Manager scans your links in the background using WordPress cron. This lets it parse links from your content without impacting your website’s speed and performance.
3. Convenient, Real-Time Reports
As you make changes, Slim SEO Link Manager automatically analyzes your content and creates real-time reports for all your links.
For each link, it will show detailed information such as the target, anchor text, URL, dofollow status, and HTTP status code.
Even better, it shows all these reports in a central location so you can easily get an overview of your linking strategy and link health, across your entire WordPress website.
4. Identify Top Linked Posts
When building internal links, you’ll want to prioritize your site’s most important pages. This helps visitors discover this content, but internal links also help distribute ‘link juice’ across your site. By adding lots of links to a particular page, you’re telling the search engines that this content is important and should appear higher in the search engine rankings.
That said, Slim SEO’s Top Linked Pages report lets you see exactly what content you’re linking to. In this way, you can check that your most-frequently linked pages are actually your site’s most important content. You can then make any adjustments, in order to highlight the right content.
You can also use this report to identify pages that need some more internal links, or pages that are getting too much link juice.
5. Analyze Your Outbound Links
When it comes to outbound links, it’s helpful to know the sites and pages you link to the most, along with whether those links are dofollow or nofollow. This insight can help you control the amount of authority you pass to these third-parties.
The Top External Links report shows the external URLs you link to the most. Each line in this report shows the full outbound link, plus the number of times you’ve used that link.
Going further, you can see all the pages that feature a specific external link.
To do this, simply click the link in question within the report.
This feature is particularly useful if you ever need to remove an outbound link from your site, as you can simply work your way through the list of links.
6. Anchor Text Report
Anchor text helps search engines and visitors understand what the linked page is about. To help you track and understand these keywords, Slim SEO has a dedicated report where you can see which keywords you use the most in your anchor text.
This report includes the keywords used in both internal and outbound links, so you’ll get a complete picture of how you’re using keywords.
You can also explore this report in more detail, and see all the pages that use a specific keyword as anchor text.
7. Highlights Orphaned Pages
When a page is ‘orphaned,’ it means you haven’t linked to it from any other page or post. Orphaned content is difficult for visitors and search engine bots to find, so they’re bad for both the user experience and your WordPress SEO.
Thankfully, Slim SEO Link Manager makes it easy to find these stranded pages. In fact, it automatically identifies orphaned pages and displays them all in a dedicated report.
This makes it easy to add internal links to these pages.
8. Broken Link Checker
Broken links typically occur when moving a site to a new domain name or when deleting a post or page without setting up a redirect. However, they can also happen due to something simple like a typo.
No matter how they happen, broken links are terrible for the user experience, and can damage your WordPress SEO. To help you out, Slim SEO will monitor all your links and display any HTTP error codes in its ‘Link Statuses’ report.
9. Fixes Broken Internal Links Automatically
If you edit a post’s slug at any point, then its URL will change. This can cause broken links across your WordPress website, so you’ll need to find all the internal links that point to this post and then update them. This can take a ton of time and effort, especially for larger websites that have lots of posts.
The good news is that Slim SEO Link Manager can do all the hard work for you. Every time you update a post’s slug, it’ll scan your site and then update any internal links automatically.
10. Easily Update Broken Outbound Links
Outbound links take users away from your site. These could be links to affiliate products, social media sites, or third-party articles your readers may find interesting. In this way, external links can improve the visitor experience, or even help you make money online blogging.
However, a third-party website might change their post’s slug, remove an article, or even change its domain name completely. This can cause broken links across your website. This isn’t your fault, but it can still hurt the visitor experience and make your site seem unprofessional.
Thankfully, Slim SEO Link Manager can help you fix broken outbound links. In its Link Updater tool, simply type in the old link and the new link you want to use instead.
It will then scan your posts for the original link and replace it with the new, working link. This can save you a ton of time and effort, while making sure you don’t overlook any instances of the broken link.
You can also click on any HTTP status code, to see a list of all the pages that have this error.
If it’s an outbound link, then Slim SEO will show the full URL. Meanwhile, it’ll show the page title for internal links.
11. Integrates with WordPress Block Editor
In addition to its site-wide reports, Slim SEO shows all the internal and external links for an individual post, directly inside the WordPress content editor. Simply scroll to the ‘Link Manager’ box below the main post editor and you’ll see all the post’s internal links, outbound links, and any internal links that are pointing to this post.
Slim SEO updates these reports in real-time so you’ll see the latest information, even as you’re editing the post. It also displays the status of all these links, so you can fix any broken or outdated URLs straight away.
12. Automatic Link Suggestions
Internal links help search engines like Google crawl your website and discover new content to index and rank, so they’re important for SEO.
Internal links also help visitors find related posts, so they can increase pageviews and reduce your bounce rate.
When creating a new post, Slim SEO Link Manager can improve your internal linking by suggesting related posts you may want to link to. In fact, it will automatically suggest some posts based on the keywords in the article you’re currently working on.
Want to only link to posts that have the same category or tag? Then enable the ‘Same Taxonomies’ slider and Slim SEO will only suggest posts that meet this criteria.
If you’re not happy with the suggested articles or want to look for more posts, then you can type in some keywords manually.
Slim SEO Link Manager will then display all the posts that include these keywords.
For each post, Slim SEO will suggest a sentence you can paste into the current article in order to create a natural-sounding internal link.
13. Help Visitors and Search Engines Discover New Content
As already mentioned, when creating a new post Slim SEO will show a list of related posts you may want to link to.
However it can also help you build links from existing posts to the new content. That way, when you click ‘Publish’ the post will already have relevant internal links. This will help visitors and search engines discover this new content.
To do this, simply click the ‘Edit’ button next to any suggested post.
This will open a popup where you can edit the existing post.
In this way, you can quickly and easily add a link to the current post.
14. Re-Scan Your Site
If you need to re-scan your site at any point, then simply click the ‘Scan now’ button again. This removes all the previous link data and recreates all the reports from scratch. With that said, this may fix some common WordPress errors you can encounter when using the plugin, such as new links failing to appear in your reports.
15. Supports Page Builder Plugins
Are you using a page builder plugin on your WordPress website?
Slim SEO integrates with many popular page builders including Beaver Builder, Divi, Oxygen Builder, Elementor, and Breakdance. This means it can analyze and display a page’s internal and outbound links, even if you designed it using a page builder.
16. Connect Multiple WordPress Websites
Do you run multiple websites? Then Slim SEO lets you connect different WordPress websites together using a secret key.
With that done, its ‘Link Suggestions’ box will include a new ‘External’ tab. Here, Slim SEO will suggest linking to other sites in your network.
When you add external links in this way, they’ll appear in the plugin’s External Outbound reports. You can also monitor the health of these URLs in the ‘Link Statuses’ report.
Even better, Slim SEO will help you maintain these links. If you ever update a URL in the network, then Slim SEO will automatically update this links across all your connected sites. In this way, you can avoid broken or redirected URLs across your entire network.
17. Add Missing Features and Integrations
For more advanced users, Slim SEO Link Manager provides some hooks so you can extend the plugin. For example, you might add support for custom fields so Slim SEO can include that content in its link reports. In particular, you can use hooks to integrate Slim SEO with popular custom field plugins such as Meta Box and ACF.
You can configure Slim SEO Link Manager so that it ignores certain URLs. This is particularly useful if you’re an affiliate marketer, and don’t want to include affiliate URLs in your link reports.
18. Community and Professional Support
Slim SEO Link Manager is designed with ease of use in mind. After activating the plugin, you can simply click the ‘Scan Now’ button and it’ll build detailed reports for you automatically.
Slim SEO will also monitor the health of all the internal and outbound links across your site, and clearly highlight any HTTP status codes. In addition, Slim SEO will suggest relevant internal links, so you don’t need to spend time looking through your pages and posts for related content.
However, at some point you may need extra help, or have questions you want answering. In that case, Slim SEO Link Manager has clear online documentation that explains the various reports in detail, and covers all the plugin’s major features.
Prefer one-on-one support? Then all the premium plans come with email support. Simply log into your account and submit a ticket, and a member of the Slim SEO team will get back to you as soon as possible.
For more on this topic, please see our guide on how to properly ask for WordPress support.
Slim SEO Link Manager Review: Pricing and Plans
Ready to improve your inbound and outbound linking, and boost your WordPress SEO? Slim SEO Link Manager has 3 plans that can help you achieve those goals.
Unlike some other SEO plugins, you’ll get the full range of features and reports, no matter what plan you choose.
The major difference, is the number of sites where you can use Slim SEO Link Manager:
- Personal. For $39 per year, you can install the plugin on a single site.
- Freelancer. Priced at $79 per year, you can use Slim SEO Link Manager on up to 10 websites. That said, this is a good option if you’re a freelance WordPress developer or designer, or own several sites.
- Agency. For $99 annually, you can install Slim SEO Link Manager on an unlimited number of websites. With that said, this plan is perfect for WordPress development agencies.
Slim SEO Link Manager Review: Is It the Right Linking Plugin for You?
To sum up this Slim SEO Link Manager review, we’re confident that it’s a great plugin for simplifying your link management and improving your search engine rankings.
It can help you build a strong internal linking structure by suggesting relevant posts you may want to link to. Even better, it displays these links directly in the WordPress content editor and even suggests some text you may want to use to create the internal link.
Beyond that, Slim SEO Link Manager comes with a range of reports that can help you spot trends with how you’re using internal and outbound links, and anchor text. If there’s a problem with a link, then Slim SEO Link Manager will clearly highlight it your dashboard, so you can solve the issue as quickly as possible.
We hope this Slim SEO Link Manager review helped you decide whether it’s the right linking plugin for you. Next, you may want to see our guide on how to track website visitors, or check out our expert pick of the best analytics solutions for WordPress.
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