Internal and external links
Link, hyperlink, reference – what do these terms mean?
What exactly is the difference between links, hyperlinks, references, internal and external links? How many internal links should you include per SEO site from a SEO perspective? When will there be too many internal links? And what is Linkjuice anyway? Answers to questions that often reach us as an SEO agency.
An important factor for Google are recommendations from other websites. These recommendations are hyperlinks or references to other Internet content (“links”) and are often identified as underlined words within a text or in the footnote of a website. A classic example of a link is this one: http://localhost/wp_eyet/
There is a lot of confusion about this topic among many users, including professionals. As an SEO agency, we get almost daily questions like:
- What are internal links?
- What are internal and external links?
- How many internal links per page?
- How important are internal links?
- What is Linkjuice?
What are internal links?
Internal links link content to your website. For example, one blog article refers to another. Also the menu of your site consists (mostly) of internal links. They are important for search engine ranking, but not nearly as important as external links.
What are internal and external links?
Internal links are links within your web content. The navigation of a website, for example, usually consists of 100% internal links. External links are links that go from your website to others or vice versa; they are also understood as recommendations.
How many internal links per page?
As a rule of thumb, do not use more than 200 internal links per site. With the limit Google wants to prevent manipulation. The number is not set in stone, it also depends on how strong the external links are.
How important are internal links?
Internal links can positively influence the ranking of a page. The more, the better the page will tend to the keywords used – but only if the external links are strong. On its own, internal links hardly work.
What is Link juice?
Linkjuice describes the positive effect that an internal or external link can have on the landing page ranking. For example, the landing page receives linkjuice to the keywords in the link itself through a text link.
An example of Link juice: Internal Links – this landing page now gets Link juice to the keyword “Internal Links” from this blog post.
Of great disadvantage is when a page receives no internal links. These pages are called Orphan Pages or Orphan Pages. They are caused by mistakes or as a temporary solution. As a rule, search engines rate these pages as bad, which can make the entire ranking of a complete website suffer.
Types of links – diversity with different effects
There are not only text links, but many different types of links. The most common are text and image links. The different types of links have different peculiarities and potentials that influence the weighting in the optimization for search engines:
text links
Text links can be divided into many sections and categories. For example, where the link was placed on a website, how often it appears on the page, and whether it refers directly to your page or leads to your page through a redirect.
Anyone surfing the internet knows these links, where a new page will be opened in your internet browser as soon as the link has been clicked on. Frequently such pages contain the logo of the company and a message informing you that in a few moments you will be redirected to your desired page.
When categorizing links, web site operators (also known as webmasters) have no limits.
The most common text links within search engine optimization are content or footer links .
picture links
References that are often not recognized are images that are directly linked to specific content on the Internet. In nine out of ten cases, experience shows , image links are used for internal linking, to enlarge images on other pages, or to simplify the user’s actions with the image.
An example would be to put a reference to a product that is scanned in the picture.
Image links are rarely used for external links. For image search engine optimization, external image links are hardly important, except in some niches.
The weighting of text links and image links in search engine optimization
Search engine optimization is not an always-fixed workflow and so varied that in only a few cases can you work for quality assurance with a “laboratory environment”.
Our conclusion on the weighting of links:
For a good optimization you usually need all types and types of internal links to show the search engine that you want to have users on their website. This is best done by setting a healthy mix of links. Some of them should be image links and others in-content links. The mixture of the individual links makes the SEO success.
The order of links sorted by weight (from insignificant to significant):
- picture link
- Footerlink
- ContentLink
Watch out for the keywords – on the anchor text!
Especially in the design of internal links, but also in external, you should pay attention to the keywords that are included in the link itself. These “clickable” passages are called anchor text.
A classic is “read on” or similar phrases. The disadvantage of this procedure: The linked contents get Linkjuice to the words “read on here”. But the content should rank among their own keywords. Better are formulations that respond to the content.
