What are Internal links?
Internal links are hyperlinks that point to (destination) the same domain as the domain in which the link (source) is located. In easy terms, an internal link is one that points to another page on the same website.
Code example
<a href="http://www.same-domain.com/" title="Keyword Text">Keyword Text</a>
Optimal format
Use descriptive keywords in the anchor text that give you an idea of the theme or keywords that the source page is trying to identify.
What is an internal link?
Internal links are links that go from a page in a domain to a different page in the same domain. They are commonly used in the main navigation.
These kinds of links are helpful for 3 reasons:
• Allow users to browse a website.
• They help to establish the hierarchy of information for the given website.
• Help spread the equity of links (ranking power) on websites.
SEO best practice
Internal links are more useful to establish the architecture of the site and spread the equity of the links (URLs are also essential). For this reason, this section deals with the construction of an SEO-friendly site architecture with internal links.
On a single page, search engines need to see the content to list the pages in their massive indexes based on keywords. They must also have access to a traceable link structure, a structure that allows spiders to navigate the routes of a website, to find all the pages on a website. (To see what the link structure of your site looks like, try to run your site through Link Explorer). Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or burying the navigation of their main links so that search engines can not access. This hinders your ability to get pages that are listed in the search engine indexes. Here is an illustration of how this problem can occur:
In the previous example, the colorful Google spider has reached page "A" and sees internal links to pages "B" and "E". As important as pages C and D are for the site, the spider has no way of reaching them, or even knows that they exist, because there are no direct and traceable links pointing to those pages. When it comes to Google, these pages basically do not exist: great content, good keyword targeting, and smart marketing make no difference if spiders cannot get to those pages in the first place.
The optimal structure for a website would be similar to a pyramid (where the large dot at the top is the home page):
This structure has the minimum quantity of links possible between the home page and any given page. This is useful because it allows link equity (ranking power) to flow through the entire site, which increases the ranking potential for each page. This structure is common in many high-performance websites (such as Amazon.com) in the form of category systems and subcategories.
But how is this achieved? The best way to do that is with internal links and supplementary URL structures.
For example, they are linked internally to a page located at http: //www.example.com/mammals ... with the anchor text "cats". The format for a properly formatted internal link is shown below. Imagine that this link is in the domain Techyaari.com.
For example, they are linked internally to a page located at http: //www.example.com/mammals ... with the anchor text "cats". The format for a properly formatted internal link is shown below. Imagine that this link is in the domain Techyaari.com.
In the previous illustration, the "a" label indicates the start of a link. Link tags can contain images, text or other objects, all of which provide a "click-to-click" area on the page that users can activate to move to another page. This is the initial thought of the Internet: "hyperlinks". The reference location of the link tells the browser, and the search engines, where the link points. In this example, the URL http://www.techyaari.com is referenced. Next, the visible part of the link for visitors, called "anchor text" in the SEO world, describes the page to which the link points. In this example, the designated page is about custom belts made by a man named Tech Yaari, so the link uses the anchor text "Custom belts designed by Tech Yaari". The tag closes the link so that the elements found later in the page do not have the link attribute applied.
This is the most basic format of a link, and it is perfectly understandable for search engines. The spiders of search engines know that they must add this link to the link graph of the web engine, use it to calculate the independent variables of the query (like MozRank) and follow it to index the content of the page that is made reference.
Below are some of the common reasons why the pages may not be available and, therefore, cannot be indexed.
Links in required forms of presentation
The forms can include elements as basic as a drop-down menu or elements as complex as a full-fledged survey. In any case, the search spiders will not try to "send" forms and, therefore, any content or link that is accessible through a form is invisible to the engines.
Links only accessible through internal search boxes
Spiders will not attempt searches to find content and, therefore, it is estimated that millions of pages are hidden behind the walls of completely inaccessible internal search boxes.
javascript links cannot be analyzed
Links built with Javascript can be demountable or devalued depending on their implementation. For this reason, it is recommended that standard HTML links be used instead of Javascript-based links on any page where the reference traffic of the search engine is important.
Links in Flash, Java or other add-ons
Any link embedded in Flash, Java applets and other add-ons is generally inaccessible to search engines.
Links that point to pages blocked by the tag Meta Robots or Robots.txt
The Meta Robots tag and the robots.txt file allow the site owner to restrict the spider's access to a page.
Links on pages with hundreds or thousands of links.
All search engines have an approximate limit of 150 links per page before they can stop tracking additional linked pages from the original page. This limit is somewhat flexible, and particularly important pages can have more than 200 or even 250 links in a row, but in general practice, it is advisable to limit the number of links on any page given to 150 or risk losing the ability to have Pages additional tracked
Links in frames or I-frames
Technically, the links in both frames and I-Frames are traceable, but both present structural problems for the engines in terms of organization and follow-up. Only advanced users with a good technical understanding of how search engines index and follow links in frames should use these elements in combination with the internal link.
By avoiding these pitfalls, a webmaster can have clean and substantial HTML links that will allow spiders to easily access their content pages. Additional attributes can be applied to the links, but the engines ignore almost all of these, with the important exception of the rel = "nofollow" tag.
Do you want to take a quick look at the indexing of your site? Use a tool such as Moz Pro, Link Explorer or Screaming Frog to run a site crawl. Then, compare the number of pages the crawl generated with the number of pages that appear when you run a site: search on Google.
Rel = "nofollow" can be used with the following syntax:
<a href="/" rel="nofollow"> nofollow this link </a>
In this example, by adding the rel = "nofollow" attribute to the link tag, the webmaster is telling the search engines that they do not want this link to be interpreted as a normal "editorial vote", which happens. "Nofollow emerged as a method to help stop automatic comments on blogs, guest books and junk mail links, but over time it has become a way of telling the engines to discount any link value that would normally be The links labeled with nofollow are interpreted Slightly different for each of the engines.
Final words
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