Topic Cluster Planner

What a topic cluster is (and why it ranks)

A topic cluster is one broad pillar article surrounded by several narrow supporting articles, all linking to each other. Search engines read the structure as topical authority: the pillar targets the head term, each supporting piece targets a long-tail angle, and the internal links tell Google they belong together. Building one by hand means planning 5–13 titles, generating each article, and wiring every link both ways. The Topic Cluster Planner does all of that from a single seed topic.

Planning a cluster

Open MrNiche Autoblogger Pro → Manual Posting and find the Topic Cluster Planner card. Fill in:

• Seed topic — the subject you want to own, e.g. “sourdough baking at home” or “email deliverability”.
• Supporting article count — 3 to 12. The AI plans exactly one pillar plus this many supporting titles.
• Category, Writing Style, publish mode, and optional Content Brief — the same options as any other queued article; they apply to every article in the cluster.

The planner enforces title-shape variety on its own output — a limited number of colons, at most two “How to” titles, at least one question title, and no “Ultimate Guide”-style filler — so the cluster doesn’t come out looking like a template.

Duplicate protection before anything is queued

Every proposed title is checked against your existing posts and pending queue before it’s accepted:

• Pillar collision aborts the whole cluster. If the proposed pillar matches content you already have (exact title or near-duplicate topic), nothing is queued — a cluster built around a duplicate hub would compete with your own site. Pick a different seed topic.
• Supporting titles are screened two ways: a token-overlap check catches rephrased duplicates (“Best Budget Laptops 2026” vs “Top Budget Laptops for 2026”), and a lightweight AI pass catches synonym-level overlap the word check can’t see. Duplicates are skipped individually — the rest of the cluster still queues, and each skip is reported on screen.
• If every supporting title is a duplicate, the pillar still queues as a normal standalone article and the planner tells you so.

How the interlinking works

The queue processes cluster articles in order, pillar first, so the links can be wired without any manual step:

• Supporting → pillar: each supporting article gets a contextual link up to the pillar inserted during its generation.
• Pillar → supporting: as each supporting article goes live, the pillar gains a naturally-phrased link out to it. The link phrasing rotates between several templates so the pillar doesn’t repeat the same sentence a dozen times.
• Works with Schedule and Draft modes too. Links fire at the moment a post actually goes live — so a drip-scheduled cluster, or a draft you review and publish by hand next week, still gets its hub links. Placeholder links inserted while the pillar was unpublished are rewritten to the clean permalink automatically.

Tracking progress — the Clusters page

MrNiche Autoblogger Pro → Clusters lists every cluster you’ve planned, newest first, with the live status of the pillar and each supporting article (queued, generating, scheduled, published) and an overall progress bar. The Remove button only deletes the tracking record — it never touches queued jobs or published posts. The plugin keeps the 20 most recent clusters.

Version requirements

The Topic Cluster Planner shipped in v6.3.0. The Clusters overview page arrived in v6.4.0, and publish-time hub linking for scheduled/draft clusters in v6.5.0 — running the latest version gets you the full behavior described here.