What are Internal and external links

Link Building : What are Internal and External Links

Getting Google to position your site at the top of the SERPs is everyone's goal. For this, internal and external links must be taken into account, since their proper use brings greater visibility to your site. Find out what they are about and how to improve them.

When planning a link building strategy, it is important to know the difference between an internal and external link. While both are relevant to ranking well, links to pages within your site are easier to control. For their part, those that lead to other domains must be carefully selected.

In this article, you will learn the difference between internal and external links, as well as the role of each in your SEO strategy.

What are internal links?

Internal links are links that direct the user from one page to another on the same domain. They are very common in the main navigation menu.

For example, when you visit an online flower shop you will find categories for each product. The scheme may be similar to the following:

Weddings ––> www.(domain).com/flowers-for-weddings

Anniversary ––> www.(domain).com/flowers-for-anniversary

Funeral ––> www.(domain).com/flowers-for-funeral

In an SEO context, these types of links help establish the architecture of the site and distribute equity or “link juice”. That is, to "transfer" value from one page to another. In this way, all the URLs on your site will receive attention from search engines and will have a chance to rank.

On the other hand, internal links play a valuable role in helping Google crawl and index websites. When the search engine indexes a site, it considers the internal link structure to find all the pages on a site and understand how they are related to each other.

Following the example of the flower shop, internal links are key for search engines to understand the niche of your business and the types of products you offer. This visibility is important for your site to appear in Google results when a customer searches for these products in the area.

What are external links ?

An external link is a link that points from one website to another. These are relevant to SEO as they indicate to search engines that a domain provides useful and trustworthy information.

Google uses external links as one of its ranking factors to give websites a score based on their quality and trustworthiness. The more popular sites link to your domain, the more authority you have on the subject and, therefore, the more chances you have to rank.

Now, it is essential that you know that external links benefit both the origin website and the destination domain. For example, the links that point from another website to yours are known as backlinks and help improve the domain authority or Domain Authority, which benefits PageRank.

Meanwhile, the links that point from your website to another are called outgoing. They are good for SEO when the target domain is an authority in the niche, because they demonstrate to search engines that your content is backed by trusted sources.

The opposite effect is achieved with backlinks and outbound links to spammy domains, negatively affecting your site's reputation and rankings.

Importance of having a mixed link profile

Both internal and external links influence SEO and user experience.

Internal links have advantages such as :

• Transmission of equity between the pages of your site.

• They help Google understand the content of your pages.

• They make it easy to discover new content, as search engines can efficiently crawl and index your pages.

• They allow the user to navigate easily, find what they are looking for and discover related content.

On The Other Hand, External Links Help To :

Show Google that your site is a source of authority on certain topics.

Provide referral traffic to other credible websites, which can increase reader confidence in your content.

Establish long-term relationships with other domains within your niche.

Now you know, an effective link building strategy includes both varieties of links to help you create a balanced profile. Of course, you should be very selective when linking to other sites and monitor the quality of the backlinks your domain receives, avoiding bad practices such as sharing or buying links.

To get good backlinks, the secret is to generate content that inspires people to share it. In this way, you improve the natural flow of links on your site and the number of visits.

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