The guides between your listings can still bring readers in.
On a directory the template links everything to everything, so the few pages somebody actually wrote get lost. Silotree ignores the template, finds the articles nothing links to, and suggests links from pages you already wrote. Approve them from a weekly email, about ten minutes a week.
- Free audit, no account
- First 10 links written free
- Undo any batch
of the links on a listing page were written by a person. The rest are the template, and they do not count here.
- Missing pagePlumbers in Leeds — category, unwritten84 listings · no page about the categorySearch position —
- CompetesPlumbers in Leeds city centreTemplate links only · 0 in the writingSearch position #21
- CompetesEmergency plumbers LeedsTemplate links only · 0 in the writingSearch position #24
- BuriedHow to vet a plumber before booking1 link in · your only real articleSearch position #8
Every listing links to every other listing through the sidebar, which is why they all look equally important and none of them ranks. The one page somebody actually wrote is the one nothing points at.
Ten minutes a week, on posts you already wrote.
- 1
Get a free audit
Paste your address. Silotree reads every post and lists the ones nothing links to — the posts readers and Google rarely reach.
- 2
Approve five links a week
Once a week, the best five suggestions arrive by email: a sentence you already wrote, a phrase in it, and the post it should lead to. Approve or skip.
- 3
We write them in
Press Write and the plugin adds exactly those links. A revision is saved first, and any batch comes out again in one click.
If your pages are generated and nobody writes prose on them, there is very little for this to work with — there are no sentences to put a link inside. That is said on the page rather than discovered after you pay.
The template does your linking, and it does it badly
On a directory site most links are generated: related cities, nearby listings, category footers. They are navigation wearing the clothes of editorial links, and every tool that counts them concludes the site is superbly linked while every page sits at position thirty. Excluding them is the difference between a report that looks healthy and one that is true.
Three things a general linking tool misses here
The category page nobody wrote
Forty pages about coworking in different cities, and no page about coworking. Search engines have nothing to rank for the head term and your forty pages compete for the long tail. This finds that as a missing page rather than an error, and briefs it.
Find the categories with listings and no page about the category, which on a directory is the single largest gap and the easiest to fill.
Pages that are identical apart from a noun
Where two pages differ only by the place name, they compete for each other's queries. Competing pages here are found from Search Console — two URLs the same search actually returned — rather than guessed from titles, because on a directory every title looks like every other one.
Read the pages as text rather than as templates, so near-identical listings group together and the one page with real writing on it stops being averaged in with them.
Depth that the template hides
Everything is one click from everything, through the footer. Through the writing, a city page can be unreachable. The second number is the one that matches how these pages perform.
Ignore the sidebar and the mega-menu entirely when measuring how far a page sits from home, which is the only measure that matches how these pages actually get crawled.
If your pages are generated, linking is not your problem
Where the content is a database rendered into a template, thin pages beat structural fixes: no arrangement of links makes two hundred near-identical pages worth ranking. This will tell you which ones compete, and the fix is usually fewer, better pages rather than more links between them.
Before you run it
Does this work on a site that is not WordPress?
The crawl, the map and every finding do. Writing links back is WordPress-only, because that is where a revision and an undo can be guaranteed.
Can it tell a generated link from one I wrote?
That is the core of it. Only links inside the content region of a page count towards anything — never navigation, footers, sidebars or related-post blocks — and on a template-heavy site that is most of the links on the page.
We have thousands of pages. Will it cope?
The crawl is bounded and resumable, and the queue is ranked so you are never handed a ten-thousand-row table. What we have not yet proved is a site of fifty thousand pages overnight on shared hosting; the largest we have run is far smaller, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.
You already wrote the guides.
Give them a way to be found.
Free audit with no account. Your first 10 links are written free, and paid plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Free audit · No account needed · No changes to your site