What Is An Internal Link?

Date First Published: 13th September 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 3/10

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

An internal link is a hyperlink from one webpage to another within the same website or domain name. For example, if a website linked to its contact page in the footer, that would be an internal link. If the website included a link from one webpage to another located on a different domain name, that would not be an internal link. It would be an external link.

Internal links help users to navigate through a website quickly without having to manually type the URL, help establish an information hierarchy for the page, and help web crawlers find, crawl, and index the pages on a website. Since web crawlers follow links to other pages across the World Wide Web, pages that have no internal links cannot be found or indexed by search engines unless an external site links to them.

Like other types of hyperlinks, internal links contain anchor text, which is the visible text a user sees when visiting the webpage and an embedded link that points to another location on the 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 internal link. It is often used when the website owner does not want a specific page to be crawled, but nofollowing internal links is not recommended. Instead, pages should be blocked from being indexed by other methods, such as using robots.txt or adding the noindex tag to the header of the HTML page.

Internal Links Within The Same Domain Name

Internal links can be external in some contexts, even if they link to the same domain name. For example, a link from one subdomain to another on blogging platforms, such as Blogger and WordPress can be viewed as an external link. These blogging platforms host thousands of different websites on subdomains, such as mysite.wordpress.com. The main domain name (wordpress.com) is not owned by any of the authors of the sites that host their websites on these subdomain names. In this context, a link may only be viewed as internal if it is linked within the same blog on the same subdomain, not to other blogs that are hosted on the same domain name. But, if someone has a website with subdomain names owned by them, such as blog.example.com and support.example.com, links to these subdomains are internal to the site, but some services may consider them to be external links.