Matching rules and link appearance

Six settings decide what gets matched and what the link looks like once it is rendered. They apply to links created by SYNC and, unless you say otherwise, to manual links too.

Each link stores its own value for every setting below. Turning on Global Override replaces all of them with the global value.

Case sensitivity

When Case Sensitive is enabled, the plugin only matches keywords with exactly the same capitalisation as the stored keyword.

If the keyword is WordPress with Case Sensitive enabled, the text wordpress in lowercase will not be matched. With it disabled, both forms trigger a link.

Default: disabled. The plugin matches regardless of capitalisation, which produces more links on most sites.

Partial match

When Partial Match is enabled, the plugin matches a keyword even when it appears inside a longer word or in a different grammatical form.

If your focus keyword is robot, Partial Match will also match robots, robotics and robotic. With it disabled, word-boundary mode applies: only robot surrounded by spaces or punctuation matches.

Enable it for languages with rich inflection, where plurals and verb forms would otherwise be missed. It increases the number of links created across the site.

Disable it when you need precise anchor control. The standard counter-example: car should not match carbon or scar.

This setting widens matching. It does not rephrase anchors. If you want a different wording, create a manual link.

Priority

When several keywords could match the same text on a page, Priority decides which link wins.

Lower values are processed first: a link with priority 0 takes precedence over one with priority 1. Two links with the same priority are resolved by creation date, earliest first.

Default: 0 for all links.

In practice, give priority 0 to your cornerstone pages and higher values to supporting content, so the strategic pages are served first when a phrase is contested.

Limits per rule

Max Links caps how many times one rule may be applied within a single page, not how many links that page ends up carrying in total.

Default: 3.

The distinction matters and is easy to get wrong. If three different keywords each match on the same page, each one is capped separately: with Max Links at 2, that page can render up to six links, not two. The setting limits repetition of a single keyword, which is what makes an anchor read as spam; it is not a global density ceiling.

To control total density on a page, reduce the number of destinations that share vocabulary with it, use the keyword exclusion list, or exclude the page itself.

Verified by reading Automatic Internal Links 2.0.11, where the counter is kept per rule identifier.

Appearance: bold anchors

When Bold Anchor is enabled, the linked text is wrapped in <strong> inside the <a>:

<a href="/destination" title="Page Title"><strong>keyword</strong></a>

Use it on content-heavy pages where links would otherwise be overlooked. Avoid it on pages with little text or a clean design, where bold anchors feel heavy, and anywhere the extra emphasis would compete with genuinely important content.

Link attributes: new tab and nofollow

New Tab adds target="_blank" to generated links.

Nofollow adds rel="nofollow".

WARNING

Using nofollow on internal links is generally not recommended. It tells search engines not to pass authority through the link, which defeats the purpose of internal linking. Reserve it for external links.

Where these settings live

All six appear in the Global settings block of the Settings tab, and individually on each link in the Manual Links interface.

Read next

• Overview — how detection and replacement work
• Controlling what gets linked — keywords, tags, URLs and pages to skip
• Manual links — defining anchor and destination yourself
• Anchor text guide — what makes a good internal anchor