Links: The Importance of Internal Linking

How do internal links provide rich information to search engines?

Each link on your website provides valuable information about how a section relates to other sections. Search engines produce such directed graphs to infer insights about the structure of your website. No longer do site maps provide all the information necessary for Google’s complicated algorithms. A clear hierarchical structure is also formed by the mapping from directories to URLs. This information forms a directed graph with the condition that any child item may have only one parent. The directed graph of your website defines associations between the sections. Links are enriched by the user’s devices. Links can be a call to action for many native functions of the users’ devices. Some external links to your page do not hold any page ranking weight. This can include many in places on common websites like facebook.com etc.

How do users get extra value from great links?

In addition to the search engine optimization benefits, links play an important role in user experience. Well-placed links can help users navigate complex topics and find the information they need quickly and easily. By providing clear and relevant links between pages, users can move seamlessly between different sections of your website, making their overall experience more enjoyable and efficient. Therefore, it is important to ensure that links are placed strategically and labeled appropriately to enhance user experience and engagement.

How do external links add value?

Links to third-party websites and links from third-party websites are essential for building a graph of related and validated content associations. By linking to high-quality external resources, you can provide additional context and value to your users. Additionally, linking to well-established and reputable sources can help establish your website as a trusted authority in your niche.

Moreover, when other websites link to your content, it signals to search engines that your website is a credible and authoritative source of information. This can improve your website’s search engine rankings and increase your visibility to potential users.

However, it is important to ensure that the external links you include on your website are relevant, trustworthy, and add value to your users. Similarly, it is crucial to build high-quality content that other websites would want to link to. By doing so, you can create a network of interlinked content that improves user experience, builds your brand reputation, and positively impacts your search engine optimization efforts. In is also important to keep your links working. There any many standard tools available to automate this process, but is is worth noting..

Tips when creating internal links

Permanent links: preserving features.

Links often behave directly like filesystems. While their content may change or new entries can be added, it is hard to make changes to large collections of links by changing the name of a parent directory without effecting its children.

Keeping links permanent allows your emails and other documents to stay rich by preserving the link’s ability to resolve to the indented content.

Creating permanent links to each of your pages allows you to create links that are not the primary link. Which can allow you some flexibility when changing any links. Imagine. /Docs/one and /Docs/two, if /Docs changes, so does each of its children. For example, /Docs changes to /Guide, now its two children are /Guide/one and \Guide/two.

A change like this would break any existing links to the old path; instead, it’s best to use permanent links to pages that are crucial. Take our example of /Docs/one, instead of linking to this page as /Docs/one, create a separate link for this page, a permanent one. Like /one-permanent. Now you can change the parent of one freely.

Other methods exist, if needed, however using server redirects can get complicated.

Link target errors

Absolute vs relative URLs

When creating links on a website, it’s important to ensure that the target of the link is correct. This is especially important when specifying links to internal pages on the same website.

One common mistake is to reference the relative path of the internal link without including the / prefix. When this happens, web crawlers may append the path to the link source path, leading to issues with crawling and indexing.

This can result in crawlers repeatedly requesting pages in a loop, which can significantly impact the website’s performance and the crawling process. This loop only ends when a certain threshold is reached, causing major issues with the website’s visibility and accessibility in search engine results.

To avoid this issue, it’s essential to carefully specify the correct target of internal links and ensure that the links are properly formatted with the correct prefixes to prevent crawling issues. Using the absolute URL is always the preferred option where it can be used.

    <a href="some/path/">Link</a>
  

    <a href="/path/from/website/root/">Link</a>
  

   <a href="https://example.com/path/from/website/root/">Link</a>
  

While using a correctly formed relative URL is often the preferred or best practice people turn to. Often because it enables the links to navigate to a new page or resource without making the website content data be bound to an explicit origin. This enables the website owner to develop on the website, or use the website to be used with other origins very easily. However, this approach is not the best possible approach. Instead, prefer to interpolate your website baseURL in places where it’s required.

<a href="[[baseURL]]/some/path/from/the/base">Link</a>