5 Best Free Links Management Plugins for WordPress

In this article we will be discussing the Free Links management plugins for wordpress . So  if we talk about SEO then permalinks of web pages and external URLs have a great impact on Search Engine Rankings of content. Short and clean permalinks with target keywords help search bots to recognize the content more efficiently. Web pages with a good URL structure can be ranked higher in SERPs and compared to ugly URLs. URLs without a keyword, very long URLs, or misleading URLs can be harmful to your blog.

Links in a blog including both internal links and external outbound links should be managed with great care. Internal links are those which lead to the other pages of your blog. The interlinking of pages is also important regarding SEO point of view. Also, the external links that lead to other websites should also be handled with great care. In the recent Google algorithm updates, a number of blogs are affected due to links issue.  So, in order to keep your blog safe from Google penalties, you should take care of permalinks and URLs.

So, in this article, I am going to share Top 5 Links management plugins for WordPress blogs. These plugins are free and will help you out to have a full control over all internal as well as external links.

WP External Links

WP External links is the best Free Links management plugins for wordpress plugin which allows you to fully control all the external links of your blog. This is the best WordPress plugin to add rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links in WordPress blogs. Along with that, you can also set custom link title and link icon for all external links. In order to open all external links in new window or tab, you will need to add target=”_blank” to them. You may also add target=”_new” or target =”_top” to all your outbound links with the help of this plugin.

The styling of external links is also made easy with this plugin. Just write the name of the custom class you want to set for all outbound links and define your CSS styling for that class.  If you want to pass link juice to some of the links or contributors then you can white-list those specific links just by putting their URL’s in the settings panel of this plugin.

Pretty Link

Pretty Links is a handy WordPress plugin that is capable of link masking, tracking, and redirection. You can easily shrink external links under your own domain and make them look prettier with the help of this plugin. For example, if you have a long affiliate URL then you can make it look like www.youtsite.com/a/affiliate-name or anything you want.

This shrinking of Affiliate links also helps a lot to increase affiliate sales. You can also select link redirection type i.e. 301 (Permanent Redirect) or 307 (Temporary). Another benefit of your pretty link is that you can track the number of hits gotten by each link. Link nofollow attribute, links grouping, and parameter forwarding can also be enabled easily for each type of link.

Pretty Link Pro version is also available with the number of more amazing features.

Custom Permalinks

This plugin allows you to choose custom permalinks for all types of WordPress pages including Posts, Pages, categories, Tags etc. Normally WordPress users can select custom permalink structure from the settings panel that is applicable for all Posts, categories, and tags. But if you want to choose different slugs/URLs of each post, tag, category then this plugin can do this job. Just install custom permalinks plugin and activate it. Now you will be able to choose custom URL structure of each WordPress page, post, tag, category etc.  differently. An example of custom permalinks for WordPress is given below:

www.example.com/post_type/taxonomy_name/term-slug

Broken Link Checker

Broken links in WordPress that lead to 404 error pages are one of the major problems that also impacts the SEO of the blog. There can be many reasons due to which links become broken and once the visitor clicks on the link, it leads to a 404 nonexistent Error page. With the help of Broken Link check plugin for WordPress, you can easily find and manage all the broken links that are present anywhere in your WordPress blog. The plugin notifies you via Dashboard or Email whenever a broken link is found so you can update or unlink it. You can directly edit links from the configuration page of the plugin and also disallow search engines to follow broken links with the help of this broken links checker plugin for WordPress.

Redirection

This is the best Redirection Plugin for WordPress that allows you to find and redirect 404 Error Pages in WordPress. Its one of the best Free Links management plugins for wordpress Along with that, you may also redirect any URL to a custom URL of your choice. Just set the Source URL and destination URL from the plugin configuration page and click the add redirection button. Rest of task will be done by the plugin itself. You may also redirect a URL to a random post of your blog with this WordPress redirection plugin.

I hope that these Link management Plugins will help you out to fully control the behavior of all internal as well as external links of your WordPress blog.