Different Link Types
There are three different link types that affect your website – internal links, external links, and incoming links. Here are the links you can control in your page markup:
1. Links to Internal Resources
These are links to resources that are to be used to augment the current document, generally automatically processed by the user agent.
EXAMPLE – Linking style sheet instructions to a web page
<link rel=’stylesheet’ href=’http://yourdomain.com/ver=1′ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />
2. Links to Internal Pages or Documents
These are links to internal pages within your website that your want your visitors (and Google) to find. These links are created using a hypertext link and can be one of the most power page elements within your website.
EXAMPLE – Linking to internal web page
<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/web-page”>anchor text</a>
2. Hyperlinks to External Pages or Documents
This is basically a “backlink” to other website. Typically, you would include a link to another website for your viewers that offers a resource relevant to your viewer and content on the page the link is originating from. Viewers can click the link and navigate to that resource, e.g. to visit them in a browser or download them. Important: Search bots also crawl these links.
EXAMPLE – linking to another website
<a href=”http://www.other-resources”>click here for more resources</a>
Anatomy of a Hypertext Link
Anchor text are the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web.
In the above illustration, the “<a” tag indicates the start of an ALT tag. Link can use images, text, or other objects, all of which provide a clickable area on the page that users can engage to move to another page. This is the original navigational element of the Internet – “hyperlinks“. The link referral location tells the browser (and the search engines) where the link points to.
In this example, the URL http://www.link-destination.com is referenced. Next, the visible portion of the link for visitors, called “anchor text” in the SEO world, describes the page the link points to. The page pointed to is about “Anchor Text“. The </a> tag closes the link, so that elements later on in the page will not have the link attribute applied to them.
This is the most basic format of a link – and it is understandable to the search engines. The spiders know that they should add this link to the engines’ link graph of the web, use it to calculate query-independent variables (like Google’s PageRank), and follow it to index the contents of the referenced page.
Let’s say we have a web page about search engines and in the content is the phrase, “Google provides search data and so does Bing.” There are two unique pieces of anchor text and each one provides a separate link: “Google provides search data” is the anchor text pointing to http://google.com/, while “Bing” points to http://bing.com.
<a href=”http://google.com”>Google provides search data</a>
<a href=”http://bing.com”>Bing</a>
Search engines use anchor text to help determine the subject matter of the linked-to document. In the example above, the links would tell the search engines that this website thinks that “Google provides search data” is relevant to http://google.com and “search data”, while “Bing” is relevant to www.bing.com.
Importance of Hypertext Links
If there are many sites that think a particular web page is relevant (linking to) for a specific phrase (keyword), that page can manage to rank for that specific search term. This is called “link relevancy” which is determined by both the content of the source page and the content of the anchor text. It is a natural phenomenon that occurs when people link out to other content on the web.
EXAMPLE – Google search the phrase “click here“ and review the results. Do you see any listings that look out place? Click on those links and review the content on the page… Do you see the phrase “click here” mentioned anywhere in the content? This is power of anchor text and linking.
This human–powered information is essential to modern-day search engines. Search engines use this information to determine what the target page is about and thus, which queries it should be relevant for. These descriptions are relatively unbiased and produced by real people. This metric, in combination with complicated natural language processing, makes up a major portion of the link relevancy indicators online.
Key Points:
- If many links point to a page with the right keywords in their anchor text, that page has a very good chance of ranking for the anchor text phrase. Real examples of this include the search engine result pages for the query, “click here” which ranks near the top of the results. Many of the results for these queries rank solely due to the anchor text of inbound links.
- People have a tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either the domain name or the title of the page. This is an advantage to SEO’s who include keywords they want to rank for in these two elements.
- Too many inbound links to a page with the exact same keyword-rich anchor text may cause Google to scrutinize that site’s link profile more closely. Using manipulative methods to acquire backlinks may result in a manual penalization that will hurt the website more than keyword–rich anchor text will help.
Link Variations
According to the W3C standard, there are 14 different link relations for HTML5 that are defined by this specification. The most unusual is the “nofollow” link relation.
The syntax for a “nofollow” link looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com” rel=”nofollow”>link description (anchor text)</a>
There are a lot of attributes you could apply to a link, but the search engines will ignore almost all of them with the important exception of the rel=”nofollow” tag. In the example above, by adding the rel=nofollow attribute to the link tag, the search engines are told that we (this website) do not want this link to be interpreted as a “normal” link (and we are not ‘voting’ for this website’s popularity).
Nofollow, taken literally, instructs search engines to not follow a link (although some do.) The nofollow tag came about as a method to help stop automated blog commenting, guest book submissions, and link injection spam, but has morphed over time into a way of telling the search engines to discount any link value that would ordinarily be passed. Links tagged with nofollow are interpreted slightly differently by each of the engines, but it is clear they do not pass as much weight as normal “followed” links.
Backlinks – Are “nofollow” Links Bad for Your Website?
Although nofollow links do not pass as much value as a regular link, they are part of a natural and diverse link profile. There is much debate over the value of a nofollow link and you can find opinions about them on most SEO oriented websites.
READ: Google states that they will not (usually) follow nofollow links and these links will not transfer PageRank or anchor text values. Fundamentally, using rel=nofollow drops the target links from their overall graph of the web. For a complete explanation read through Google’s Use rel=”nofollow” for specific links article (and watch the video from Matt Cutts too).
READ: Having a thorough knowledge of HTML markup and the correct use can have a big impact of search ranking. This Moz article, The Hidden Power of Nofollow Links by Nicole Kohler can give you insight to the power of linking (even nofollow links).