Migrating from another internal linking plugin

Internal linking plugins fall into two families, and which family your current plugin belongs to decides everything about how the migration goes.

Some write links into your content. The <a> tag ends up in post_content, in the database. Deactivating the plugin leaves the links in place, because they are now part of your posts.

Others inject links at render time. Nothing is written to your content; the plugin holds a set of rules and applies them as the page is built. Deactivating it removes every link instantly. Automatic Internal Links works this way, which is why deactivating it is a complete undo.

Do not take a vendor's description on faith here, including ours. Test it.

The test that answers the question

On a staging copy, never on production:

1. Pick a page that clearly shows links created by your current plugin, and note two or three of the anchor phrases.
2. Deactivate the plugin.
3. Reload the page.

If the links are still there, they live in your content. If they are gone, they were injected at render time. Some plugins do both depending on the feature used, so check a page from each linking feature you actually rely on rather than a single sample.

This takes five minutes and tells you exactly what the rest of the migration looks like.

If the links survive deactivation

Your existing links stay where they are. That is good news for continuity and a small complication for cleanliness: Automatic Internal Links will now work alongside links that are physically present in your content.

That is a supported situation. The plugin never creates a link inside an existing <a> tag, so your old links are preserved untouched and no nesting occurs. What you get is the old links plus the new ones, which can push some pages above a comfortable density. Watch the Max Links setting and lower it if pages start to feel over-linked.

If you would rather start from a clean slate, the old plugin's own removal or bulk-delete tooling is the right instrument, and it belongs to that plugin, not to ours. Take a database backup before using it.

If the links disappear on deactivation

Nothing to clean up. The links were never in your content. You are swapping one rule engine for another, and the only thing you lose is the old plugin's rule set.

Expect a gap: between deactivating the old plugin and completing your first SYNC, those pages have no automatic internal links at all. Keep the window short, and prefer doing it outside your busiest traffic period.

From Link Whisper

Link Whisper is a broad internal linking platform rather than a single mechanism, with suggestions, auto-linking rules, reporting and orphan detection. Which of its features you used determines what the deactivation test shows, so run the test on a page from each feature you rely on.

Note what you would be giving up as well as gaining. Its reporting and orphan detection have no equivalent here; this is a narrower tool by design. The honest comparison is in Link Whisper vs Auto Links for SEO.

From Internal Link Juicer

Internal Link Juicer maintains its own keyword configuration, separate from your SEO plugin's focus keyword field. The migration question is therefore less about links and more about where keyword truth should live.

If your SEO plugin already stores a meaningful target phrase for each page, our pipeline reuses it rather than asking you to maintain a second list. If your SEO plugin's keyword fields are empty, run Auto Focus Keyword first, because otherwise there is nothing for the linking layer to read. See Internal Link Juicer compared.

From manual linking

Links you wrote by hand are part of your content and stay exactly as they are. The plugin adds to them rather than replacing them, and it will not create a link inside one of yours.

This is the easiest migration, because there is nothing to migrate. The only decision is how many automatic links to allow on pages that are already well linked by hand. Per-page exclusion is the precise instrument for the handful of pages you want left alone entirely.

The migration sequence

1. Back up the database, and run the deactivation test on staging first.
2. Note your current state: which pages have links, roughly how many, and to where. You will want this to compare against.
3. Deactivate the previous plugin. Do not delete it yet.
4. Install Auto Focus Keyword, then Automatic Internal Links, in that order. Quick Start covers the full setup.
5. Run FETCH, then SYNC on the keyword layer, then on the linking layer.
6. Read the activity log to confirm the rules that were created.
7. Spot-check real pages on the frontend, because the log lists rules, not rendered links.
8. Only then delete the previous plugin.

Step 3 and step 8 are deliberately far apart. Keeping the old plugin installed but inactive costs nothing and gives you a one-click rollback for as long as you want it.

What to check afterwards

Compare against the state you noted in step 2. The three things worth confirming: pages that had links still have them, the anchors point somewhere sensible, and nothing crossed a boundary you care about, such as language on a multilingual site.

If links are missing where you expected them, troubleshooting starts with the usual cause, which is almost always cache.

Read next

• Quick Start — the full setup path
• Requirements and compatibility — check before you start
• How Automatic Internal Links works — the render-time mechanism
• Link Whisper compared — what each tool is actually for