You see? No need for a separate table of dangling links, if you make sure that every article comes into existance. Subqueries are really nice.
That's a bad idea, because often you will have articles with many links to non-existent pages, which would all have to be created. This would blow the CUR table out of proportion, with no real advantage.
Note that my impression is that the main reason the site is so slow is simply that MySQL doesn't handle very large tables very well (maybe subqueries would help here, I don't know). That's why we should try to avoid making them bigger while we still use it.
Regards,
Erik