Internal Linking - How does internal linking work?
Internal linking is the hyperlinking of pages inside a website. There are many ways to do this. One way is to use tags, which are highlighted phrases or keywords underlined or bolded. Tags are often placed at the end of web page content to help visitors find related pages easily. Another method for internal linking is to create links between sections of a web page, or even to different websites altogether. Links allow readers to move around the Internet effortlessly. Without proper internal linking, search engines can’t understand what your site is about, making it harder for people to find what they want.
The best internal linking strategy comes down to good SEO (search engine optimization), which includes keyword-rich titles, descriptions, headings, and meta tags. When it comes to internal linking, Google doesn’t care whether a link takes them to a parent page or subpages; all major search engines treat all internal links equally.
How Search Engines See Internal Links
Search engines follow two types of rules when crawling sites: “follow the breadcrumbs” and “don’t repeat yourself.” While these rules provide only general guidelines, they have helped search engines become much smarter over time. These basic principles are applied to every website crawled by search engines—and the same rules apply to internal links.
When crawlers follow links, they don’t know where each link leads until they get to the end. In some cases, search engines consider the URL of the linked page as the anchor text. If the linked page contains information relevant to a user query, then it may receive extra weight in search results. However, if the linked page is irrelevant, it won’t affect rankings. A search engine spider may decide to skip a page entirely if it finds the page’s own contents (or those of its subpages) more useful than the linked page.
Google follows four basic principles when dealing with internal links:
• Make sure the webpage being linked to is useful
This means that it should either answer the reader’s questions or offer additional value. You should not link to a page in the website https://uniquebacklinks.com unless it helps readers.
• Avoid linking to duplicate content
Duplicate content means that there already exists similar material somewhere else on the Web. Duplicate content causes search engines to lose track of a page and makes it less likely that a visitor will click on a link to that page. If your site contains duplicates, make sure you remove them.
• Don’t spam search engines
Spam happens when someone adds an excessive number of links to a single page. When done excessively, spamming can negatively affect a site’s ranking because it looks like a bad actor trying to manipulate search results.