About this plugin
WP Tracklink watches the HTTP referrer on normal front end visits. New hosts go into a small queue. A cron job fetches the remote page, checks that it links to you, then stores the host and click counts.
Features
- Background verify so page loads stay light
- Optional strict mode that requires a real anchor to your domain
- Classic widget and a block editor block
- Sort by clicks, last seen, or score
- Free Tranco ranking download (no API key) or a local click based score
- Privacy options: host only or anonymized paths
- Retention cleanup on a daily cron
- CSV export and a small click chart in settings
- Per host rel attribute (nofollow, sponsored, ugc)
Score without paid APIs
Tranco publishes a free top sites CSV. Once a week the plugin can download that zip and keep ranks only for hosts already in your table. No signup and no API key.
You can also use a local score derived from clicks and recency, or turn scoring off.
me/wp-tracklink/
External services
This plugin can connect to the following third-party / external services.
Tranco (tranco-list.eu)
Tranco is a research-oriented public ranking of popular websites. When score mode is set to “Tranco list”, the plugin uses it to show relative popularity scores for referrer hosts you already track.
zip. The request is a normal HTTPS download of that public list. The plugin does not send your site content, visitor personal data, referrer URLs, or an API key.
Tranco’s servers may see standard web request metadata such as your server’s IP address and User-Agent (see their privacy policy). After download, only ranks for hosts already stored in your Tracklink table are kept locally.
You can turn this off anytime by setting score mode to “Local score” or “Off” under Settings > Tracklink.
This service is provided by Tranco (DistriNet, KU Leuven).
eu/
eu/privacy_policy
Referrer page verification
When a new referrer host is queued, your server may fetch that referring page once (response size capped) to check whether it links to your site. That request goes to the referrer’s own host, not to a single fixed third-party API. No visitor personal data is forwarded beyond what a normal browser request would include in server logs on that remote site.
This only runs for hosts that appear as HTTP referrers on your front end (search engines and many bots are ignored).