The Link Component of SEO refers to the number of links on your own website that point to another page on your website. By having a lot of different internal links pointing to one page, this tells Google “hey, we think this page is really important”. All else the same, if one page has significantly more internal links to it than another page, the page with more links will likely rank better on Google.
Last Updated on May 12, 2022
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Internal Linking
When building internal links, be conscious of high level marketing pages (general main nav pages) vs. blog pages. Generally we want our lower level pages to link to our higher level pages. Also be aware of the anchor text of the internal link.
Bonus: Outbound Links
Outbound links are links that point away from your domain to another domain. Linking to other websites can be useful; according to moz.com, “Links provide relevancy clues that are tremendously valuable for search engines… Links tend to point to related content. This helps search engines establish knowledge hubs on the Internet that they can then use to validate the importance of a given web document.” So outbound links can actually help Google understand what your site is about.
These links must be carefully managed. Some people think that all links away from your website should be marked as “no-follow” telling Google that you don’t want them to count this link. This, however, is not a best practice. Google almost certainly rewards external links to quality sites/pages. If a link will give a better user experience then usually it’s fine to put the external link in your content, and can even have a beneficial impact. The NYTimes saw value when they implemented external links into their content. Watch the interview where they discuss that here.
Another item to consider is if your site has 10 links from other sites, and you have 1,000 links leaving your site, it’s going to appear that you are not a good source of content. It’s better to have way more links pointing to your site than leaving your site.
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