Funny, for the case of the welcome topic here I have been working through the incoming links to remove them. It’s not just that the welcome topic is more popular than it should be but those links are going to be very confusing and technical sounding to new members here just as they are finding their feet in the community.
Moin helpfully reminded me about the ability to append ?silent=true to the links to suppress those related links, which I am now doing.
I also moved @thoka’s topic explaining how silent links work to the community wiki: Add "silent" internal links by appending ?silent=true.