What should be the best practice for implementing an external link for a website’s SEO? How to use the anchor link? Should you nofollow all external links? In this article, we’ll discuss all these points.
What is the external Link SEO
When you implement a link to other websites into your webpage called an external link, there could be a question in your mind, is it good to add an external link for SEO purposes? If it is necessary, you can add the link to the external website. You can give a do-follow link to an external website if it is more relevant and trustworthy.
How you can use nofollow, noopener, and noreferrer rel-tag for external links SEO.
How to implement an external link to your website?
New Tab: Whenever you provide an external link in your article, make sure that the link opens in a new tab. This will help your webpage to maintain traffic that means users clicking on that link, not leave your website.
rel-tag: use rel-tag rel="nofollow" in the anchor of the external link. suppose your external link is a low-quality website, then you can nofollow it. In the latest updates from Google, you’re only guiding search engines that links should not be followed. But it is up to Google that it follow it or not. For more information, you can read this article on Google’s official website.
<a href="https://seoneurons.com" target="_blank">Link Text here</a>What is the use of nofollow noopener noreferrer?
All these tags nofollow noopener noreferrer blocks the search engine in a particular manner. Let’s understand how it impacts external Link SEO.
Use of nofollow for External Link SEO.
It is an attribute to [a] tag that tells the search engine what to follow and what to not. When a blog post uses nofollow to any external link, it tells Google that this link should be nofollow, and the search bot will not follow that. In the latest updates from Google, nofollow will only tell that this link should not be followed, but it’s up to on search engine that it will follow or not. According to the search engine, there should be a mix-up of the follow and nofollow external links.
You should add nofollow attributes to external links that are less trustful, and all other links that are truthful should be followed. It means you’re making a perfect web and stopping the crawler from less trustworthy links.
Use of noreferrer noopener for External Link SEO.
noreferrer noopener: cross-origin info not pass, instructs the browser not to send referer information along with the header. That means receiving URL receives direct traffic instead of referring from your domain.
WordPress CMS automatically adds noreferrer to the links when you choose to open in a new tab. <a href="https://www.example.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Link to Example.com</a>. Here example.com is an external website, and target=”_blank” means open in a new tab and rel="noopener noreferrer" prevent header information.
rel="sponsored": If you’re adding anything that is sponsored, please use this attribute to identify advertisements, sponsorships links on your website.
rel="ugc": stands for User Generated Content, you can use it for where a user creates a link, this attribute should be added like in comment, forum, etc.
What if I don’t external Link?
Suppose you’re not providing an external link. You name the website and done. But what happens will the user may search that term and try to find the same website in the search result, it will cause pogo-sticking. Learn About Pogo Sticking. So External links are important. And to maintain external Link SEO, you should follow the tags provided.
Noopener has no effect on the SEO of a page and enhances security, so with any external link adding this attribute is recommended.
I hope you liked this article on External Link SEO. If you’ve any doubt regarding this, then please comment below.
