Linking Plan Overview

The link map shows you your site's structure; the Linking Plan tells you what to do about it. It analyzes the map and produces a prioritized list of internal links to add or fix: which pages to connect, plus AI-suggested anchor text and placement for each link.

Where to find it

The Linking Plan lives inside a link map, so you need a crawled map first. See Crawling Your Site.

1. Open the client's Link Mapping section and open a link map.
2. Click Plan in the canvas toolbar (next to Crawl).

You can return to the canvas at any time with Back to Link Map.

Every page needs a type

Recommendations are built on page types (Money, Pillar, Supporting, Service, Location, Company, Archive, Product) and topic clusters, so the plan is only as good as that input:

• Untyped pages block accurate recommendations. If any pages are missing a type, a red Pages Need Type Assignment panel appears at the top of the plan. Assign a type (and optionally a cluster) to each page right in the panel, or fix them on the canvas. See Page Types & Clusters.
• Unclustered orphaned pages appear in their own panel. Assign each one to a topic cluster so RankNest knows which pages it belongs near; you can create a new cluster from the dropdown without leaving the page.

How to generate a plan

1. Open the Linking Plan for your map. If no plan exists yet, you'll see a short empty state.
2. Click Generate Linking Plan. RankNest analyzes the map structure and creates the full set of recommendations. This stage is quick, because the detailed AI writing happens later, on demand.
3. When it finishes, the plan loads: a progress bar at the top, recommendation tabs (All, Reciprocal, One-Way, Hygiene, Anchors), and your pages listed as expandable cards, each showing how many links it needs.

If the map looks stale, use Rescan Pages from the same empty state to recrawl the site before generating.

Reading the plan

• Plan progress shows the percentage of recommendations you've handled, with counts for done, to add, and dismissed.
• Same-cluster pairs counts pages in the same topic cluster that should link to each other.
• Unclustered counts orphaned pages still waiting for a cluster assignment. Click it to open the assignment panel.
• Recommendations are grouped by page: each card is a source page with the links it should add, a type chip, its cluster, and a mini progress bar. Pages are ordered so the highest-impact work floats to the top. Start at the top and work down.

For what each recommendation means, see Recommendation Types. For the day-to-day workflow of acting on them, see Implementing Recommendations.

Keeping the plan current

The controls in the plan header keep recommendations in sync with the live site:

• Rescan & Refresh (with Recrawl site first checked) recrawls the live site, picks up new pages and links, automatically marks recommendations as implemented when it finds the link you added, and regenerates the pending list.
• Uncheck Recrawl site first and the button becomes Regenerate Plan, a fast recompute against the current map data. Use it right after you change page types or clusters.
• Both paths preserve your implemented and dismissed recommendations; only pending ones are replaced.
• Export downloads the whole plan as an Excel workbook, which is the easiest way to hand a link-building checklist to a client or writer.

Tips

• Spend your time getting page types and clusters right. That's the input the AI reasons over.
• You don't have to mark links complete manually. Adding links on the live site and rescanning later works too, since RankNest auto-detects links you've already added.

Troubleshooting

The plan shows "No linking plan analysis found for this map." No plan has been generated yet, or an admin deleted it. Click Generate Linking Plan.

A panel says pages need type assignment. One or more pages have no page type. Assign types in the panel (defaults to Supporting) or on the canvas, then regenerate.

Recommendations reference pages that no longer exist. Run Rescan & Refresh with Recrawl site first checked so the map reflects the live site, then review the Hygiene tab for links to removed pages.

Related

• Recommendation Types
• Implementing Recommendations
• Link Mapping Overview
• Page Types & Clusters