In this article, we’ll share some information about site’s back-links and internal links, about what they are and the best way to make them.
Table of Contents
An anchor text link or, simply, “link” is clickable text in a page that takes the user somewhere else. The Link could be a part of text like this:
Or it could be an image:
So, when you click on the link, it takes you somewhere else. But where? You never know… unless you see the source code, or sometimes when you hover the mouse on it, you may have a preview of the address you will be taken to:
But if you are using Google Chrome for example, with a little knowledge of HTML, you will be able to find out the destination of the link via the source code:
The highlighted HTML tag in the above picture is <a>. This <a> tag creates links. You can use <a>.
Based on the source and destination of the links, they can be divided into internal, outgoing and incoming / external links.
Internal links are the types of links that the source and destination are on the same domain. For example, if we have a page with this URL: http://mysite.com/internal-page.html
And if there’s a link in that page that redirects the user to: http://mysite.com/another-internal-page.html thus, the link will be counted as an internal link.
A very good example of internal linking is Wikipedia. In every article of Wikipedia, keywords are linked to other articles in Wikipedia because they explain that word better in that destination article:
In the above picture, you’ll see so many internal links in the intro section of the article. Other sections and paragraphs have internal links as well, but less than the introduction.
So, internal links are in-site links that take the user from one page to another, within the domain, to share more information regarding the linked keyword.
Google uses this strategy to weigh keywords in a site. It means, if you have a good linking scheme in your site, the linked keywords will have more significance to Google and thus it will rank your website higher compared to other websites, for those keywords.
Outgoing links are the links that the destination is another domain than the source domain. So, for example if website1.com has a page and inside that page there’s a link to website2.com, this link will be counted as an outgoing link for the source website (website1.com). Sending too many links outside is bad for SEO.
Outgoing links are like “giving a leg up” to the destination site!
Do you want that for your site? Maybe, sometimes it’s good to help other sites, and it’s not much of a trouble. But if you do that frequently, your rankings will drop and your destination websites will also not benefit from it much. Because the boost that you send to them will diminish over time, because divided by the number of outgoing links.
In other words, the more outgoing links, the worse for your site. The less outgoing links is better for your destination websites. And less harm for your rankings.
But having a few outgoing links (like 1 reference link in an article) every once in a while is not bad. It will give some credibility to your content.
The opposite of outgoing links are incoming links. It means your website will receive a visitor from another website through a link.
So, if the user visits website2.com and clicks on a link that redirects him to website1.com, this destination site, which we call “target page”, will have a small boost in rankings in Google results.
Backlinks are good for the destination website, unless they are low quality, like a link in a page will hundreds of links! Those are called “link farms” and are not good for SEO.
Google used to enforce a penalty on the sites that get backlinks from link farms, pornography websites, gambling websites, websites with a virus or malware and other harmful websites.
But then some website owners complained that they never got a backlink from those sites and those links were added by competitors (negative SEO). So, Google added a service called Disavow Tool. It was a tool that Google accepted a list of backlinks that the verified website owner wanted to ignore by the search engine. So, the negative impact would go away.
But then Google made another decision and as of its update in 2016 (known as Penguin 4.0), it devalued bad / low quality links instead of penalizing the destination website.
So, today, there are no worries about getting low quality backlinks, but there still should be some caution.
Now that we know getting a backlink for the target site is a good and positive thing, it raises a question like: how to get backlinks?
It’s our most difficult task in SEO. Because the websites are inconsistent, unstable and sometimes hate to give outgoing links! So, there is a wide spectrum of websites… so many types. And they are managed differently. A very unpredictable environment. What should we do?
After years of working on websites, we can use the experience and divide the back-linking sites to these types:
Each of these categories have their own methodology to get a backlink from. Each website is unique with a special configuration and administration. Some admins allow outgoing links (mainly because they are too busy to control or simply don’t know anything about SEO). Some admins are strictly against outgoing links.
We can tell Google to ignore a link and don’t follow it and don’t pass value to the destination site with it, using a “rel” attribute in <a> tag, like this:
<a href=”http://website1.com” rel=”nofollow”>Keyword1</a>
With rel equals nofollow, Google will be flagged to ignore the link. Though, the search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, etc.) is free to follow the link if they want (probably for an up-to-date index database), but the website owner is telling the search engine to just don’t pass any value to the destination website because it’s not an important link.
So, some admins give “nofollow links” instead of do-follow links. What does that mean?
It means, Google will not count this link as a backlink. But it may follow it to do some data maintenance for its own database. So, we should always get backlinks that don’t have this nofollow in their <a> tag.
But speaking of experience, it’s been proven that Google considers “some” value in nofollow backlinks too. Because, it constantly compares websites with each other. And if there is a site with a clear backlink profile for a specific keyword and then there’s another website with some no-follow backlinks for that particular keyword, Google will pick the latter website to rank higher in its SERPS (search result pages), because Google considers nofollow links some positive signals that tell about the site’s roots and popularity among other sites.
So, as a result, getting nofollow backlinks are better than getting nothing. Especially these days, that almost 70% or more of backlinking websites allow only nofollow outgoing links.
Moreover, you should pay attention to noindex meta tag. Some pages have noindex tag in the <head> section of their html. And Google will not index those pages in its database.
Additionally, some back links are “redirect”. It means the source website will take the users to a temporary page for a few seconds and then uses JavaScript to take the users to the destination page. This will kill the value of that link! So, getting such links are useless. Unless you get traffic from that site (like Twitter). So, if the final link is like this:
<a href=”http://website2.com/?r=http://website1.com”>Click Here</a>
Your effort has been useless. Because it’s a redirect link.
Please pay attention to these tips while getting backlinks. They are gathered by experience, mainly via try and error.