The SEO Guide to External Links

The red arrow is pointing to the external link.

The source page of this https://keywordspeopleuse.com/seo/glossary/a and it is pointing to the destination page at https://clarity.microsoft.com/.

The link uses the anchor text “Microsoft Clarity”.

If we look at the HTML source code we will see that it looks like this:

<a href=”https://clarity.microsoft.com/”>Microsoft Clarity</a>

So we can see that this link has no additional relationship information with it, so this link will pass PageRank from the page it’s on to the page it links to, so this means it’s good for SEO for the site being linked to, links like this are often known as “dofollow” or “followed” links.

The link could have been tagged with the relationship attributes using the rel= tag:

<a rel=”sponsored” href=”https://clarity.microsoft.com/”>KeywordsPeopleUse</a> would tell Google this is a sponsored link where there is a commercial relationship between the sites, such as a paid link or an affiliate link. Google wouldn’t use this link for ranking purposes, so no SEO benefit.

<a rel=”ugc”href=”https://clarity.microsoft.com/”>KeywordsPeopleUse</a> would tell Google this is a link placed in user generated content, so the linking site can’t necessarily vouch for the link. Google might use this link for ranking purposes, so there may be some SEO benefit, but not guaranteed.

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”https://clarity.microsoft.com/”>KeywordsPeopleUse</a> would tell Google this is a link is one where the author of the linking page (for whatever reason) does not want to endorse the page being linked to for ranking purposes, this might be because you are linking to a competitor, or just to content that you want to reference in a negative way, such as sharing an example of place to avoid. Google will usually respect this directive and not pass any SEO ranking benefit.

In general I’d just recommend in all other circumstances to have your external links as dofollow links.

Why do External links matter for SEO?

External links differ from backlinks in terms of how they might help your SEO, any effects will be more nuanced than receiving a backlink from another site. However, there are positive reasons for including links to external websites where you can.

Associate with high quality sites

High quality sites tend to link to high quality sites, so by linking to external sites of a high quality you are trying to indicate to Google what sort of sites you want to be associated with.

Conversely don’t link to poor quality sites without using a nofollow attribute. 

Associate with relevant sites

Sites within similar topic areas tend to link amongst themselves, you may not want to link to a direct competitor (that’s not a hard and fast rule, if it makes sense then still do it), so look to link to relevant sites.

Great for your readers

Linking out to external pages that will be helpful to your readers makes you content more helpful and Google wants content to be helpful.

It’s good for the web in general

The web relies on links for it to work to the best benefit of every internet user. Links are what make the web great and we shouldn’t forget that, so do your bit to make the web better by linking to external sites when it’s in the best interests of your site and your users.