What are External links?

A strong SEO strategy can help you increase web authority and generate more traffic to your website in this competitive world. From the marketing perspective, SEO is central to a web’s visibility online.

In order to build a strong SEO plan, the first step is to have a solid understanding of fundamental SEO principles. And External Link is what we’re about to discuss in this post.

We will look at some of the most vital aspects of an external link, find out “What are external links?”, and “What do role external links play in an SEO strategy?”

Already, let’s dive in!

Table of contents

• What are External links?
• External Links and Internal Links: The differences
• 2 Types of External Links
• The role of External links in SEO
• Determining factors of high-quality external links
• Some Tips for External Linking
• The bottom line

What are External links?

External links are hyperlinks that point from one domain to another. In other words, if a website links to yours, you can consider this action as external linking.

Furthermore, if a hyperlink from a different site links to your web, it’s called an ‘inbound link.’ Another term that is commonly used to mention these hyperlinks is ‘backlink.’

So what’s it called when you link your site to a different domain? Let’s find out in the next section: the distinction between external and internal links.

Related Posts:

• Importance of Internal Links in Magento 2

• What is Anchor Text?

• Why are backlinks important?

External links and Internal links: The differences

In the world of SEO, not all links are the same. They even come with different names and have particular roles and effects on the overall SEO performance.

External Links and Internal Links

External links

As mentioned above, the term ‘external link’ is used for links added to your website content that navigate to other domains across the Internet.

In many cases, external links are used to provide readers with more information from other sources (not your web) that you deem valuable. Usually, the pages where users navigate to will have similar content as yours or otherwise relate to your business’s products/ services.

Though external links make your content more informative and valuable to readers, they have a minor influence regarding strategic SEO value. The SEO benefits accrue for the web you link to, not yours.

Code Sample: Your text (anchor text) goes here

Internal links

With internal links, the source webpage (containing the link) and targeted web page (which the link points to) are within a web domain. And external links point toward the webpage on a separate domain.

Now can you see the difference? Basically, creating internal links is when you link a web page of yours to a URL within that website.

For instance, you write a blog discussing the importance of SEO in Magento 2. Before that, you already had a post talking about Best SEO Tips For Beginners. Then, you can link these 2 posts together in order to provide more information about SEO for readers.

Internal links form a logical and connective web structure of your website that helps visitors navigate through your whole web in a systematic way.

2 Types of External links

External links have two main types: Do-follow links vs. No-follow links.

Do-follow links

A do-follow link is a link that passes the authority of the origin site (also known as link equity or link juice) to the targeted site.

Do-follow links improve a web’s domain authority, indirectly influencing your web rankings in search engine results. By default, links are do-follow, so there is no need for rel=" dofollow" when linking to a website.

No-follow links

In contrast to do-follow links, no-follow links do not pass any link equity to the web it links to. As a result, they don’t have any benefits regarding SEO. To create a no-follow link, you just need to add a rel=’nofollow' to the code.

The Role of External links in SEO

External links play an essential role in SEO projects because of several advantages for your online presence.

In fact, external links have always been a vital factor Google uses to decide your web rankings. It is mostly based on the idea of how people talk about your site in the digital world.

Increases the web’s visibility

Like any other search engine, Google always aims to display search results that are most relevant to users’ queries. External links from other websites that link to your web will:

• Become the proof of the popularity of your web, which makes it easier for Google algorithms to track and evaluate your site performance

• Show Google and other search engines the relevance of your web content for users’ particular search intents and queries

On the other hand, external links you put on your own web can benefit you in different ways. The webmasters of the web domain you link to might notice yours on reports of traffic sources.

That’s being said; they can add URL links to your web content, giving you more organic traffic. No matter what, external links can boost your website’s ranking with proper implementation.

Add value to user experience

As mentioned earlier, the actions of a link to another website provide readers with more detailed and relevant information around the topics they search for online.

For example, customers read a blog about the eCommerce trend, a link directing to detailed statistics will make your content much more convincing to the readers.

This, for sure, enhances the user experience and even entices them to revisit your site for more quality content.

Open more backlinking opportunities

The benefits of external linking go beyond the basic SEO techniques. Though the implementation is simple, building a natural link environment valuable in the long run requires time and effort.

When you link to other reliable sources on the web, there are more chances you get a backlink from them. In some cases, you will be the one who first asks for backlinks from other sites.

This type of natural link-building benefits all parties involved and gives you more attention and quality traffic. In fact, it’s one of the most effective SEO techniques marketers use to boost web ranking on search engines results pages.

Determining factors of high-quality External links

According to research, search engines rely on a number of factors to determine the value of external links, including the following essential factors:

The reliability of the derived domain

With a long-lived domain, good quality, less spam is always considered high reliability. External links from trusted sites also contribute because the amount of traffic is stored in individual server logs, while external links are publicly visible and easy to store. For this reason, external links are a gauge to determine the popularity of a certain website

The popularity of linked landing page

Search engines are very difficult to accurately measure popularity based on site visit metrics (according to Yahoo’s search engineers), external links are a more stable metric, and are the metric to measure easily.

The relevancy of the content of two affiliate pages

In SEO people are always interested in the word “related” and the link is, too. For example, Mageplaza is a site specializing in “magento 2” but external links’ name to “tredep.biz” a site specializing in beauty products, when customers learn about “magento 2”, they will not be concerned “tredep.biz” because it is specializing in beauty, it has no knowledge of the magento that the client is looking for. Thus, the external link here is not valid.

The number of domains

It is a criterion for evaluating the quality of an affiliate page. A site with few external links, the page is poor quality, low pagerank …, but a page with too many external links you also need to review to avoid spamming.

Anchor text is used in the link

The anchor text used in links is usually written by website admins (who can explain the site better than the computer) and will often reflect the content of the page that is linked to.

Some Tips for External linking

Prioritize the relevancy

When building external links, you should only link to pages that are relevant to the topic you are talking about on the post. Google will estimate the quality of links via the relevance of the content between the linked web pages.

As a Magento store owner, we recommend you to use an SEO extension that supports cross-links where you can link all relevant pages (including both internal and external links)

Publish great content to get backlinks

From the SEO standpoint, the quality of content is the key to quality backlinks. As we all know, backlinks are a vital SEO metric since they help build authority and trust for many search engines. They also contribute significantly to customer acquisition and retention.

There are many tactics to earn more backlinks for a site. But what good are backlinks if visitors have a poor experience on your site and just bounce?

Thus, creating quality (relevant to users’ needs and visually appealing) that gives added value to web visitors is the most natural way to earn quality backlinks.

Open Exteral links in a different tab

Your website’s external links should be opened in a different tab instead of directly in the original one. This tip could help you retain visitors and increase user experience. When users click on an external link, opening it in a new tab allows them to maintain their current browsing session. They can easily navigate back to the original page without losing their place. If you let links be opened on the original page, users who are interested in exploring a linked resource but are directed away may not return.

Avoid link farms

A link farm is a group of unrelated sites for those who don’t know, and each contains hyperlinks to other sites in the group. The purpose of this practice is to trick search engines into ranking your site higher than its actual ranking.

In fact, link farming is considered a black hat SEO technique that is not a legitimate long-term search optimization strategy. Link farms can seriously harm your web rankings since search engines now can detect this as spam easily.

Avoid excessive outgoing links

From the reader’s perspective, having too many hyperlinks on a page may be an annoyance. We recommend you to only connect to a few relevant blogs and focus on more on-page SEO for the best results.

Avoid excessive outgoing links

From the reader’s perspective, having too many hyperlinks on a page may be an annoyance. We recommend you only connect to a few relevant blogs and focus on more on-page SEO for the best results.

Do not link to your competitors’ websites

Linking to websites that compete for the same keywords will be damaging. For instance, if you’re aiming to rank #1 for the term “best Magento extensions” you should not link to a site that already holds this position. Instead, you can link to websites that bring benefits to your content, like blog pages that provide general information.

The bottom line

Before adding an external link, ask yourself 2 most essential questions:

• Does this link add more value and information to the subject of my content?

• Does the webpage I’m about to link follow Google guidelines and have a high ranking on the Internet?

If the answers to these questions are yes, it’s exactly the external link you will want to add to your content.

In short, the role of external links in SEO is vital. It is not only one of the determining criteria for the web on the results of the search engines but also has a direct effect on the quality and credibility of a website.