Hand-placed internal links vs automated 'related' modules

Hand-placed internal links vs automated 'related' modules
Client leaned 100% on an auto 'related posts' widget. Every link was the most recent post, not the most relevant.
— Automated modules: scale to thousands of pages free, but they link by recency or tags, not by what actually deserves the equity.
— Hand-placed contextual links: surgical, pass equity to the exact page you're pushing, but they don't scale past a few hundred edits.
The move: auto-modules for the long tail, hand-placed links for the top 50 money pages. Manually link your 10 priority pages from every high-authority page on the site.
Audit the auto-module's output — if it's linking blog posts to each other and starving product pages, gut it.