Why Links Are So Important

Links are the currency of SEO (I don't remember where I read that). Links can help build topic authority, create a good user experience, and help search engines and readers discover more of your content.

Here's a few important things that links do for your site:

• Internal links connect the pages of your site together like a spider's web.
• Internal links help readers find more content on your site.
• Internal links help search engines find content on your site.
• External links to other sites can improve your credibility because you can use them to cite sources.
• External links can create a good user experience for the reader when you link out to useful resources.

How to link: Anchor text

Related article links are a great way to keep readers engaged and increase pageviews and engagement metrics.

Related article links also help establish your site as an expert publisher on the topic being covered. The anchor text you choose should be descriptive and informative - you're basically telling the reader where they're going.

Link to full names, sources if you're citing another site, TV shows, movies, phrases that indicate to the reader where the link leads to.

Avoid using single word anchor text unless that one word is the name of a person, show, site, or social media platform, like P!nk, Friends, Vogue, or Instagram.

Similarly, avoid linking entire or half sentences.

Examples of good anchor text:

"unlike the other student bitten by a genetically-altered spider..."
"student bitten by a genetically-altered spider" would link back to a different article

Or, "...as reported in the November 12 issue of the Gotham Gazette"
"November 12 issue of the Gotham Gazette" would likely be an external link pointing to another site.

Both of the above examples give the reader an idea of where the link leads to and some idea of what to expect.

Examples of poor anchor text:

Click here
Read more
Here

Google advises against using "here" as anchor text because it doesn't tell readers or search engines what the page is about.

What to link to

Link to tag pages, category or subcategory pages, on-site articles, off-site articles that are relevant to the page or article that you are creating (source pages).

Should I Follow or Nofollow The Links?

In general, all of your links would be followed links, meaning the search engines will check them out. But all links are not equal.There may be times when you want the search engines to ignore the link because you may not have control over them (like links in comments or forums) or they are paid links (such as affiliate links).

For user generated links found in comments and forums, the best practice is to nofollow the links. This is how you tell the search engines to ignore them.

This attribute tells Google that you do not want it to associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from your site.

Sponsored and affiliate links - links with commercial intent - should have a rel=sponsored attribute:

<a rel="sponsored" href="https://example.com/Cheddar_cheese">Cheddar</a>

This attribute tells Google what the link's relationship is to the page it's on.

When to not use the nofollow link attribute

Generally, you do not want to use nofollow on internal links. Note: There are exceptions to this rule, but we aren't covering them here.

If you have an external link to another site because you are citing it as a source, do NOT add nofollow to the external link. It's rude, for one, because you're citing someone else's work. And overall, it can harm your site because you are sending search engines (and users) the message that you don't trust the information on your own site.

To quote John Mueller: "If you're a news publisher, you should trust what you're writing about." And here is John talking about nofollow links on YouTube.