External Linking
External linking is the practice of including links to other websites within your content. These links help search engines understand the context of the page, as well as provide a good user experience. External linking to high-quality sources may help boost ‘E-A-T’ (expertise, authority, & trustworthiness) in the ‘eyes’ of search engines and build topical authority for your website.
Below, we’ve compiled key takeaways relating to external linking best practices from Google’s ongoing SEO Office Hours sessions.
For more on optimizing your website’s links for search engines check out our additional resources:
5 Internal Linking Strategies to Boost SEO and Drive Organic Traffic.
Search Console Link Data Is Updated as Pages are Recrawled
The links data in Search Console but it may take Google up to a year to re-crawl pages to find new and removed links.
Unnatural Links to External Sites Might Cause All Links to be Ignored
Unnatural links to external sites, such as paid links or links within user-generated content may cause Google to lose trust in all the links from a site, so they should be nofollowed.
Google Passes Signals Normally for Links with rel="noopener noreferrer"
Following a recent WordPress update, rel="noopener noreferrer" attributes have been added to links opening in a new tab. Google ignores these attributes and passes all signals normally for these links as long they don�۪t have a nofollow.
Google Filters Identical Duplicates During indexing, and Near Duplicates From Search Results Pages
When Google recognises identical pages, it will choose one version to index, and when pages are similar, only one may show up in search results. Google looks at factors such as rel canonicals, redirects and internal and external linking when identical pages are crawled to decide which one to index.
Google uses Anchor Text Language to Infer Language of the Page
The language used in anchor text of backlinks to your site can be used by Google to infer the language of the page.
Search Console Shows a Sample of the More ‘Relevant’ Backlinks
The backlink data in Search Console is a sampled set of backlinks which Google considers to be more relevant. For small sites, this might include all the backlinks. The data includes links which are nofollowed and may have been disavowed.
External Links to Images Don’t Impact Web Search
Linked images from external sites are only factored into image search and don’t affect web search.
Google May Choose a Redirect URL Instead of the Target
The selection of a canonical URL is also based on redirects, internal and external links, and Sitemaps, but even in the case of a redirect, Google might still choose to index the redirect source instead of the target.
Use Nofollow on Links to Noindex Pages to Reduce Crawling
You can add a nofollow on links to noindex pages to reduce the liklehood of them being crawled.
Context of Links Affect Link Relevancy
In addition to the anchor text of a link, the ‘Context’ of links can be used to infer the content of the target page which seems to indicate the content on the linking page is also relevant.