What are external links?
In fact, an external or hyperlink is any link that was posted on another website but points to your web resource. Same way, when you insert a link to another resource on your site – it is called an external or outbound link.
The hyperlink points to an external domain. Today, outbound links take their deserved position among the best tools for increasing the site’s ranking they and are widely used by many developers all around the globe. Search systems consider these as third-party votes. Because of this, the ranking power passes differently. However, for ranking purposes, SEO specialists usually do not use the “title” link attribute. This is because a good SEO strategy is based on the principle that claims it is more important what others say about your web resource than what you say. From this, it becomes clear that outbound links are more useful than internal ones.
Hyperlinks started playing an important role for Internet promotion ever since early search systems like Alta Vista (later Google) appeared. One of the reasons for the rapid growth of the new search engine popularity was the development of an innovative algorithm for ranking web pages (known today as “Page Rank” made by Google). The idea behind this approach is simple. The more links that lead to a page, the higher ranking it deserves. Based on the Google Page Rank calculation, you can now easily count all references you need to increase the website PR, as well as predict it, which makes promotion a bit simpler and much more effective.
Main search systems measure the value of outbound links with the help of the following specific metrics:
- The number of references to the same page on the source site;
- The domain trustworthiness;
- The page popularity;
- The relevance of posted content on the source and target pages;
- Root domains number that links to the target page;
- The anchor text.
Popularity and relevancy. The two main reasons behind hyperlinks importance
It is difficult for search systems to measure the exact traffic of a particular resource, while this process gets much easier with external links because they are more stable. Unlike external backlinks, which as you know are available for public display and stored, the statistics about traffic is usually kept secret and stored in a site’s private server logs. What does it mean? Due to this fact, SEO specialists believe that it is without a doubt that outbound links are a perfect metric for defining the popularity of a given web resource.
If the content is more relevant to the search query, the site receives the highest position in the search results because the relevance of the content has a significant (if not the biggest) effect on the results of the search ranking (sorting). This is a big reason why content matters so much! External links should be placed on websites with relevant content. This means that placing a whole bunch of outbound links into the anchor text that doesn’t make any sense and is not related to the referring content at all is a bad SEO strategy. A good result can only be reached by placing those on websites with similar topics or content, and this is something you should always keep in mind!
How to make your page relevant?
It is not as difficult as it may seem. To improve the relevance of the page, it is very important to:
- Make each individual element relevant;
- Work on the structure of the site;
- Work on internal links;
- Improve the usability of all elements of the Internet resource.
TIP: the anchor text should be full of descriptive keywords on the same topic as the target and source pages. Correctly, selected keywords will attract targeted traffic. However, it is important to use different keyword texts; otherwise, spam detectors can block your website.
What is external link checker and how to use it?
External links are also known as outbound links that point from your website to another website. How can you find them? There are two ways:
- Explore website code to find all outgoing links. All links start with <a href=”website.com”> code, you need to select links that point to your domain.
- Use outbound link checker. Add the domain you want to check for existing external links. Press “Start” button. Get the full report with the list of inbound links.
Then you will find out where all existing outbound links are pointing, whether it’s dangerous for your website or not. If you found some links that weren’t added by you, you should delete them immediately to prevent your website from malicious links.
