External VS Internal Links: What are they & Why Are They Important

Have you ever heard about external vs internal links? If yes very good otherwise don’t worry, because in this article we will be discussing what are internal links and are external links.

Internal and External links are among the top on-page SEO ranking factors, so you should not ignore these terms, as they can help your website increase traffic

What are Internal Links?

Internal links are links in your content that redirect to your other web page. In simple words a link on your content that allows users to visit another page of your website.

How many Internal Links We Should Add to a Webpage?

This question is widely asked: ‘How many internal links we should add to our webpage’. My answer will be the same for both, internal links and external links.

An exact number is not mentioned anywhere, even the most popular website (Wikipedia) uses hundreds of internal links in its content, so there is no exact ratio defined anywhere. But good practice is to add less than 100 links is enough and good for SEO. Even Google says that it opts not to crawl all the internal links if a webpage contains more than 100 internal links.

What are External Links?

External Links are links in your content that redirect to a web page of another website. In easy words a link that allows your users to visit another page but of another website; not your website.

External VS Internal Links

Till here, you have understood the basic meaning of internal and external links. Now we will compare both, external vs internal links, in a short explanation.

Internal Links redirect your user to another page of your website while clicking external links, your user is redirected to another website

Why are Internal Links Important

Internal links are a great way to motivate your users to stay on your website. These links increase your page views because they redirect to your other page. Internal links also help google index your webpage easily.

Because if you have provided a link to a not indexed page (of your website) in your indexed webpage, then there are more chances of the not-indexed page being indexed, because whenever Google’s crawler will come to crawl your indexed page and the crawler will see the internal link (to the not indexed page) then the bot will also go to that not indexed page, crawl it and then index it.

If you haven’t understood this, I am again explaining you in simple and easy words.

The more internal links to not-indexed pages there are on an indexed page, the more likely those pages are to be indexed too. This is because when Google’s crawlers come to crawl the indexed page and see the internal link, they will follow it to the not-indexed page, crawl it, and then index it.

Why are External Links Important

There are also various reasons why external links are important for your website. Below, I have listed some of them.

• Valuable and relevant external links help your users to find more references
• By adding a trustful and relevant external link to your website, the status of your website increases.

In simple words, by adding these types of links our DA (Domain Authority) can be increased.

Conclusion

So this was a small article on external vs internal links. Hope you understand the difference between external and internal links. I also hope you liked this small and quick article and learned something new today. If you have any questions then don’t forget to contact us at mustafa@digitalmustafa.com