Internal Links vs. External Links in SEO, what is the difference?

Before we move to the nitty-gritty of things, here’s a quick definition of internal and external links and what they do.

“Links that connect pages within your website are internal links and links that connect a third-party website to your website are external links. Internal links will keep the user within your website’s ecosystem whereas an external link will move the user to another website, either in the same tab or through a new tab, depending on the HTML code used.”

Here is an example from our recently published blogs about Shopify SEO:

The anchor text in the first figure takes you to the Shopify website, which means you are leaving our blog, so it’s an external link. The anchor text in the second instance takes you to our SEO services page, which means you are simply moving to another page on the DO COMMUNICATION website, so it’s an internal link.

Now you may ask,

What is an anchor text?

Internal and external links can be placed as is, meaning, you can use a domain address like https://www.docommunication.io or you can select some text within your content and add a link to it, thus anchoring it.

Thus, anchor text is the text which has an internal or external link placed on it. For example, would you like to know more about our SEO services? That’s an anchored link right there for you.

Now, when we are talking about SEO, both internal and external links can play a very important role in your website’s performance, based on how you use them.

Role of Internal Links in SEO

Internal links offer three main benefits for search engine optimization of your website:

1. Helps with Search Engine Crawling: Allow search engine crawlers to understand your website better by leading them through the website in a relevant manner. Thus, improving the indexing and crawling of your website and improving its position in rankings. According to a recent study, internally linked pages can improve page ranks by up to 40% without needing any additional SEO efforts.
2. Improve User Experience: Internal links streamline your site navigation by providing valuable information in a “then and there” format for the users. Wikipedia’s got to be the biggest example of how internal links can help in content consumption. Every new term is linked to a relevant page, giving the site its renowned authority and user experience scores.
3. Pass on the Link Juice: An SEO term for internally and externally linked pages, where a high authority link recommends a subsequent page as relevant and important to the search engine, hence strengthening its authority. In case of internal links, the homepage has the highest authority, which is essentially your domain address. Let’s assume it’s 1, then every subsequent dilution of the URL will have stepped authority internally. For example, "www.docommunication.io/services" will have a page authority of 0.5, and a services sub-page will be 0.25 and so on.

Role of External Links in SEO

Since external links move the user outside of your website’s ecosystem, they are to be used more judiciously, and with proper tags (follow or no-follow). Here’s how external links help with SEO:

1. Enhancing the Content: Citing authoritative sources in your content can enhance the value of your content and give your content more credibility in the eyes of the readers. For example, you may not believe our take on internal and external links, but if we cite a high-authority domain like SEMRUSH for the same information, you will see the content in a different light altogether.
2. Increasing the Domain Authority: Link juice also flows between domains, so if a high-authority domain agrees to backlink to your website, it will be endorsing your website as a credible source of information. In that sense, getting more backlinks (which are external links linking to your website placed on other websites) from high-authority websites can gradually help in improving your site's authority.
3. Help with EEAT: Google and other search engines are increasingly referring to certain parameters called EEAT, which stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. Having relevant external links in your blog content improves is a part of those parameters, and can improve your EEAT scores.
4. Equity Links: External links that pass on SEO signals such as PageRank and anchor text are used by Google for ranking pages. In SEO terms these are called “do-follow” links. Having more backlinks with “do-follow” from high-authority websites can improve your rankings quickly.
5. Increasing Referring Domains: Imagine one person recommending your product or service to 100 people. Significant as it may be, it’s only a single person saying all those good things about you. But if 100 people recommend your products to 1 person each, it makes you much more credible. Same happens with external links and backlinks, the more the number of websites referring to your site pages, the better your chances of ranking. Thus, referring domains are the number of websites providing an external link to your website.

Finding and Fixing your Internal Links

Internal links are by far the easier to find and fix as they live on your website. You can use any good SEO audit tool to find internal links and see their status. Best practices for internal links include:

• Using the correct anchor text to demonstrate the purpose of the link and the information it’s leading to.
• Avoid overstuffing the content with internal links as overdoing it can confuse the search engine about the purpose and intent of the page itself. Never use two different internal links with similar or same anchor text.
• Use contextual link placements for getting the best results. For example, you are writing a new blog and the topic has some complex terms, and you have a glossary section on your website, linking those terms to relevant glossary sections will help the user and your SEO.

Finding and Fixing your External Links

External links placed on your website are easy to find and fix as you only have placed them. The main issue with external links arises when you have to discover the websites that are linking to your domain. Because, a spam website linking to your website can bring down your SEO score, as the link juice theory works in both positive and negative sense.

Hiring an SEO agency is the best course of action if you are a total novice in this domain. Otherwise, there are link research tools like AHREFS and SEMRUSH that you can use to discover backlinks.

Fixing your backlinks will require further efforts, such as:

• Monitoring domain authority of the back linking websites and reporting any unwanted links through the Google Search Console and other tools to disavow them.
• Connecting with third party websites for link edits or removal, or for requesting a change in link attributes (do-follow or no-follow).
• Constantly working to increase your referring domains by placing links on high-authority websites.

Summing it up

In the end, there’s no doubt that link building is one of the core ideals of search engine optimization. Both internal and external links play an important role in shaping your SEO and rankings. But link building is also a tedious and time consuming process and you often need to consult an SEO expert to guide you through it.