What Is An External Link?

Date First Published: 10th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Easy

Difficulty Level: 3/10

CONTENTS

Types Of External Links

Learn more about what an external link is in this article.

An external link is a hyperlink pointing from one website to a different website located on a different domain name. For example, if Website A linked to a page located on Website B, that would be an external link, but links pointing to different pages located on Website A would not be external links. They would be internal links. External links take users outside of the website and also provide the linked website (not the website with the outbound link) with SEO benefits as the quality and quantity of backlinks a website has is one of the main factors Google and other search engines use to determine the order that pages are listed in the search results page.

External links are often used to recommend a website to visitors and provide extra information. They can help bring value to the content and deliver a better user experience since they add more context to readers. Search engines interpret the external links as an organic relationship between the two sites.

Like other types of hyperlinks, external links contain anchor text, which is the visible text a user sees when visiting the webpage and an embedded link that points to another page located on a different website, which is only visible in the source code. They can be nofollowed with the rel="nofollow" attribute to instruct search engine bots to not crawl the external URL or pass any link equity.

Types Of External Links

There are two types of external links, which include:

Outbound links - These are links pointing outward from a website. For example, if you had a website, the links that point from your website to another would be outbound links.
Inbound links - These are hyperlinks pointing to a page on a website. For example, if you had a website, the links that point from another website to yours would be inbound links, or backlinks.