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Internal mesh (Maillage)

Internal links are one of the strongest SEO signals you can give Google. Articles with 0 incoming links (“orphans”) are seen as isolated and downgraded. Articles with 0 outgoing links (“dead-ends”) provide bad UX. SeoFreshUp finds both and helps you fix them.

How the scan works

The Maillage tab parses every <a href> tag in your published articles. For each link, it checks whether the destination is another published article on the same blog. The result is a graph: per-article in/out counts + a list of source/target IDs.

The scan respects:

  • Only published post_type = 'post' (not pages, products, etc.)
  • Only links pointing to your blog’s domain (external links go in the 🔗 Sortants tab)
  • Anchor text + nofollow attributes captured for analysis

Tab views

The Maillage tab has 4 filters:

  • 🚨 Orphelins (0 incoming) — most urgent
  • 🟠 Culs-de-sac (0 outgoing) — bad UX, fix easily
  • ⚠ Tous les problèmes — orphans + dead-ends combined
  • ✓ OK — articles with at least 1 in + 1 out

For each orphan, click ⚡ Action → 🤖 Suggérer des liens internes (IA). The AI:

  1. Reads the orphan’s content
  2. Compares against ~60 candidate articles (your published articles ≥500 words, sorted by topical proximity)
  3. Returns 3-5 suggestions with: target article, suggested anchor text, reason

For each suggestion, you can:

  • ✓ Apply — the plugin opens the target article, finds a relevant paragraph, and inserts the link with your suggested anchor (preview in WordPress editor before publish)
  • 👁 View — open the target article in a new tab
  • ✏ Edit manually — open the target’s WP editor

Cost

The AI suggester runs ~1 call per orphan with 3000 token context (gpt-4o-mini default). **$0.001 per orphan**. For a blog with 200 orphans = ~$0.20 total.

Bulk suggestions

Select multiple orphans in the table, click ⚡ Action en masse → 🤖 Suggest links. The plugin queues 1 AI call per orphan, applies suggestions you accept (manually one by one), and tracks progress.

Re-running the scan

Click 🔍 Rescanner tout at the top. Cached until next manual rescan (no cron). Typical scan time:

ArticlesScan time
100~5 sec
500~15 sec
1000~30 sec
5000~2 min

Why this matters

Orphan articles never rank well, even if the content is excellent — Google can only discover them via the sitemap, not via crawl. By adding 1-2 internal links from related articles, you give Google a discovery path AND transmit topical authority from already-ranked pages.

What’s next?