If you are new to SEO, or you have just been introduced to SEO as a concept, then you may have heard about the importance of ‘backlinks’ and ‘external linking’, when talking about websites.
So, what’s the difference between the two, and how does each type of link contribute to good SEO exactly? Our specialist SEO team are here to help
Backlinks are links from other websites which point towards your website, whereas external links are precisely the opposite. External links are links from your website to other websites. The usage can sometimes be crossed, but ‘backlinks’ are usually seen as valuable, whereas external links are often used to make references. Both share link juice, a trade of authority between websites, however, the difference here is perspective.
Clearly, there is quite a bit to unpack here. So, without further ado, let’s review both backlinks and external links and see how they work, and how this trading of link juice is traded differently between the two.
Backlinks and External Links: Explained
Linking between websites is a simple process where one URL is contained within a button, text or image of a website, and clicking on that element takes the user to that URL. Simple enough.
This can either link to a URL within your domain, or outside of your domain.
If the link is within your domain (ie., the URL contains your root domain address), then this is an internal link. Any link which goes outside your domain is an external link. Finally, a link which points towards your domain is a backlink.
To find the value in each of these 3, we need to look into linking between webpages and websites and see how doing so offers value to users and search engines. Let’s start with internal linking, as explaining this set can give us some insight into both external and ‘backlink’ links.
So, What Do We Mean By Internal Linking?
Here is a link to our About Us page. Clicking this link takes you to that page within our domain. As a website owner, we typically link to a page link if we want you to view something within our website. This is great for directing traffic to certain areas on a site to provide more information to a user, or to get that user to purchase something that they are reading about.
This type of linking, known as internal linking, is extremely common online, and the purposes of good internal linking are quite clear – we want users to view something, or corroborate information quickly, should the user need more information.
However, another aspect of internal linking is website navigation, this is to help website crawlers (sometimes known as ‘bots’) find, map and index content and URLs within a website’s structure.
Learn more about this in our dedicated blog, Is Site Structure Important for SEO?
Linking internally presents an opportunity for a website crawler to find new URLs within your site, and add these URLs to your website’s index. If this crawler is presented with an external link, it can either follow the link, or recognise the link, add it to its index, and continue crawling the site/page as it was before.
Learn more about indexing and crawling in our detailed blog, What is Indexing and Crawling in SEO?
Internal linking, therefore, is great because it allows crawlers to find, recognise and index all the important pages within your site, and eventually index these sites, improving your SEO outreach.
Why is Internal Linking Good for SEO?
One act of good SEO is improving the internal navigation on your webpage, to allow users and bots to find their way around your site more fluidly. Imagine users and bots coming to your site as traffic in a large urban environment. As a town planner, it’s your goal to offer a main artery with lots of little side streets which allow traffic to flow as smoothly as possible. This is how you view navigation on a website from a crawler’s perspective. Offer clear and frictionless conduits between pages in every direction.
Conversely, any page which doesn’t have a link to another page on your site can act as a blockage within the system
Good internal linking looks like a lot of streets leading from one page to another, all of which are easy to navigate and offer the possibility of movement up, down, left right etc. That’s essentially good internal linking on a site. However, it does go a little deeper than this.
Not all links are created equally. Some links are given priority over others. However, good linking differs from the perspective of humans or bots.
Good Human Linking
Humans like buttons. Beit ‘pay now’ or ‘x’ on a pop-up, humans are more likely to click buttons that fit within their expectations of what a button should look like.
When creating a webpage, you can add buttons (as opposed to hyperlinks) to potentially increase the likelihood of it being clicked by a human. A ‘pay now’ button wouldn’t be as effective within text. This is why we use buttons for major events that we want users to notice and follow.
Good Bot Linking
When a bot comes to your page, it prefers to click HTML links at the top of the page, and it offers less of a priority to links that are further down the page.
What’s more, bots prioritise links that are given in HTML over other web languages and often defer links written in .js to later in their crawl. Crawlers also prefer to click hyperlinks within texts rather than buttons, according to Google.
‘Good linking’ from a crawling perspective looks a little different from a human perspective. As an SEO, you have to bear these compromises in mind when you are creating a page, offering both links that crawlers and humans prefer in equal measure.
Good Linking for Both Humans and Bots
There are links which are great for both bots and humans, and these are header links, breadcrumb trails, and menu navigation links. These types of links offer key navigation signals for both users and bots. Humans naturally gravitate towards the top of the page and bots like to find important links there, too.
Linking within text (we’re talking hyperlinks again) offers a great opportunity to offer ‘read more’ information. We’ve done it numerous times just in this blog. It allows users to gain a further understanding of what they are reading. This keeps users on your website for longer and offers links in a way that search engines can easily understand, as your link is attributed to the words under the hyperlink. This is known as anchor text, and using it effectively can help give users and crawlers a clear indication of what is on the other side of the link.
Can You Have Too Many Internal Links?
Yes, too many links can become bad for SEO and UX quickly. So there are a few ways in which you can manage the number of links on a page to save link equity.
Learn more in our recent blog, Why Is User Experience (UX) Design Important in SEO?
Thinking about our city analogy again, good linking can offer more traffic to important parts of your city (or, more web traffic to your core service or product pages), but if you put too many links into the system, no one knows how to get to these important locations in your city.
Sometimes you might want to create a ‘Human-readable sitemap’ for your website. This can offer a location for humans to find their way around your site effectively without having to use a menu. This is essentially a raw list of URLs which can be found amongst other important links in your footer. However, because there are so many links on the page, it can offer little link equity to crawlers.
One way in which you can create more link equity (certainly to crawlers), is by applying a ‘nofollow’ directive on links which you don’t want to be followed by crawlers. This is an aspect of ‘crawl management’.
What is Crawl Management?
Crawl Management refers to the practice of optimising how search engine bots, like ‘Googlebot’, navigate and index a website. It involves controlling the access bots have to certain parts of your site to ensure they focus on important, high-value pages. In our analogy, crawl management is putting bollards on certain pages which only let humans through. Bots can be made aware of what is on the other side of the valve, but they will save their resources for other pages within the pipeline.
This process of crawl management is important because search engines have limited resources for crawling each site, known as a ‘crawl budget’. Managing this budget effectively ensures that the most relevant content is discovered and indexed.
You can manage crawls by optimising internal linking structures, using robots.txt files to block low-priority pages (like admin pages or duplicate content), and employing meta tags such as ‘noindex’ to prevent crawlers from indexing certain pages. Properly managed sitemaps and a logical site hierarchy also guide bots to your most valuable content.
For large websites, crawl management is essential to ensure bots aren’t wasting time on irrelevant or low-impact pages, allowing them to focus on the pages that drive traffic and conversions.
For smaller sites, it will help get new and important content further up the crawl queue.
By controlling and directing the crawl, you improve a site’s efficiency in being indexed, which can have a direct impact on search rankings.
In short, good crawl management maximises a site’s SEO potential by helping search engines crawl and understand the most important content.
Learn more about crawl management here.
So What About Backlinks? Backlinks Explained.
Backlinks are links which point from one domain to another. However, learning what we just have about internal linking, this may seem like it would be bad for SEO. Why would you want to move crawlers and users away from your valuable pages?
Adding backlinks to a site is actually good SEO. It also provides a share of authority between the two domains. When used well, they can be much like university referencing. I am making a claim, and here is my claim backed up by an exterior source. If you refer to an authority, then it backs up what you are saying. If an authority refers to you, then you are also likely an authority yourself.
Authority is an actual number. It can be measured by SEOs using tools such as SEMRush, allowing authority to be sought, targeted and even paid for in many instances.
Find out more about domain authority in our dedicated blog, What is Domain Authority and How Do You Increase it?
What are Paid-for Backlinks?
The whole topic of backlinks in SEO is slightly shrouded in darkness and mystery. In an ideal world, authority between sites would be passed down because the product, service or snippet of information is the most relevant at that moment. However, because backlinks are so important to building online authority, they are often bought and sold as a marketing commodity.
If I am writing about iPhones, then the best resource of information would be to link to the Apple site. Like with university referencing, linking directly to the source is usually your best bet at providing information. However, in SEO, sometimes outside sources can ask for a backlink to their domain to help bolster whatever it is that they are offering on their website. Let’s say iPhones.
Using our analogy, if I own a blog which gets 250,000 monthly views about the new iPhone, then it might be a good opportunity to link to my associate who sells iPhones within my content.
This offers my associate a clear opportunity to provide him with new customers, but it also shows that his store is trusted by an authority on iPhones (us in this case) and someone looking to become an authority (my associate).
This trade in a link can be paid for, sometimes, for thousands of pounds, and offers value as both a revenue stream, but also as a leg up in that all-important authority score.
Not bad for a few clicks.
How Many Backlinks Do You Need For SEO?
It has been estimated that around 40 or 50 high-quality backlinks help small authority sites become high-quality sites. That said, any high-authority backlinks help with your SEO.
As backlinks help your authority, a number which can be monitored through tools such as SEMRush and AHrefs, the answer to how many backlinks might be ‘more than your competition’. More specifically, you may need more good backlinks from higher authorities than your competitors to rank in first position.
Another 1 out of 100 number that is given to SEOs is ‘Keyword Difficulty’. Keyword difficulty is a number given to how difficult it might be for your keyword to target. If you have low authority, then attaining highly sought-after keywords is more difficult than if you were to have a higher authority.
Read everything you need to know about backlinks with our blog: SEO Link Building Tips: How Many Links Should I Include for SEO?
Linking Up with Wildcat Digital
As an SEO Agency in Sheffield, we help local businesses gain national attention using backlinks. As a collective of SEOs, we specialise in PR and internal link building, helping users and search engines find your website, and offer your products and services nationally, and globally.
As we have shown, the value of backlinks can’t be understated in SEO. This is why we offer services to help you gain vital backlinks, either through PR outreach or by creating top content (such as the blog you’ve just read) to help you become an authority on your chosen topic.
If you want help building your backlink profile, or you need help integrating horizontal or vertical linking within your existing website, then we can help.
Contact us or drop in to our Sheffield office for a chat on how we can help your business punch above its weight online.
Jon Herdman
SEO Executive
