Setup Internal and External Links

What are Internal and External Links?

Internal links are links pointing to any page within your site. For example if I link an old post I am actually increasing the number of my internal links. Always keep internal links as Do-Follow.

Never make the mistake of adding a no-follow link to any of your internal page. Increase the number of inbound links as much as you can so that search robots may enjoy crawling and indexing your pages.

External Links are links that point to other sites from you site. In other words when you link to any site on the web you are actually increasing the number of your outbound or external links. Keep external links minimum. Link other webs only when necessary.

Blogger rel='nofollow' link:

When you click Link in the Post Editor toolbar to hyperlink text, you’ll notice a new option about adding a rel=’nofollow’ attribute. Checking this box means that you don’t want this link to be considered when web crawlers are searching for information they’ll use to index your page.

You might want to check this box if you don’t fully trust the content you’re linking to, the link is a paid link, or simply to deprioritize this link so that web crawlers can focus on your blog’s other content. Remember that web crawlers look through the information on your blog to determine your search rankings, so deciding what information they consider affects how people find your blog.

Internal links should never be tagged as nofollow.

Now whenever you need to create a link in post editor you will see two options

Open this link in new window

Add rel="nofollow" attribute

Choose to open the link in new tab only if the link is pointing to an external site and choose the no-follow option only for links that point to low quality sites or login pages.

Which links should you tag as no-follow?

To make sure that your homepage may not loose the PR, simply add a nofollow tag to links that point to external sites. When robots crawl your content they look for links on your page and if you have tagged a link as nofollow then robots will crawl it as normal text and they will not bother looking at where the link is taking them. This prevents the PR flow to those sites tagged as nofollow. Always link mega sites and social networks as nofollow but never add a nofollow tag to any internal page. Some examples include:

Facebook Profiles, Pages, Developers page etc

Google Services such as Gmail, Google+, Adsense, Feedburner, Blogger, YouTube etc.

Mozilla and Chrome and other browser add-on pages

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google

Torrent links, rapidshare links, megashare links etc etc.

Demo, Download and Iframed Pages

and Thousand others…

So which links should be tagged as dofollow?

In real terminology there is nothing such as dofollow Tag When you leave a link in its original form without adding a nofollow tag then it means that the link is dofollow. The spiders will crawl the link, index it and will count it as an external link thereby sharing your PR juice with that external page that you have linked. So which should be kept as normal? The answer is: All Internal Links/Inbound Links and niche links.

Internal links will help spiders crawl your pages more deeply and they will get indexed often. When you link to a previous relevant post, the spider will go and check where the link is taking him thus re-indexing the previous post. This improves your search listings.

Niche links can be can not be dofollow. Always give a link to a friend’s blog or to a blog that shares the same content as you do. Of course you are linking to him because you liked his content and you wish to share his content with your readers. This is also a polite thing and more importantly when that person finds that you have linked to him then may be someday he would link to you too as a thanksgiving. Most people make network friends this way.

Now let’s see how Google supports whatever I shared today:

I hope this little post may help most of you in better understanding in-page and off-page link building. If you have any question you are most welcomed to post your query. Hope you utilize and maintain your PageRanks well because after all that is one proof of your hard work. Good day friends. :>

Nofollow external links

Nofollow is an HTML attribute specified on hyperlinks to block search engine advantage of external links in a website . In Blogger you can select HTML section of the post window and add rel=”nofollow” attribute just after URL to prevent search engines from crawling a particular link

Add Nofollow Tag to all Download, Demo & Iframed Link Pages

How to add Nofollow Tag in HyperLinks

A link has this HTML code,

<a href="http:xyz.com">Download</a>

To make any link nofollow just change the link in this way,

<a rel="nofollow" href="http:xyz.com">Download</a>

To add a noindex tag which is not very necessary do this,

<a rel="noindex" rel="nofollow" href="http:xyz.com">Live DEMO</a>

Now your PR is more healthy and safe.

Add NoFollow Tag to All Labels

Although you’ve disallowed indexing of Labels using the robots.txt file, it is better to add a nofollow tag to them so that there will be no chance for them to get indexed. Go to Template > Edit HTML and search for the below code.

<a expr:href=’data:label.url’ rel=’tag’>

Either add the nofollow tag to the end of the above syntax or simply replace it with the below one.

<a expr:href=’data:label.url’ rel=’tag,nofollow’>

Save your template.

How Google Page Rank Algorithm Works?

Google allots a fixed number of points (scores) to a web page that are then divided equally among the remaining pages that are linked from that main page.

Let’s assume, Google has assigned our page 100 points and the website contains 5 internal pages which are linked from that page i.e., 5 hyperlinks. Now, these 5 pages will gain 20 points each from Google. If two of these pages are hyper-linked using the rel=nofollow attribute, then Google will give 20 points each for the remaining 3 pages and the 2 pages that are linked using nofollow tag will not be given any points. According this calculation, the balance 40 points (100 – 20*3) are gone wasted.

Wondering whether to use the nofollow attribute in your internal links or not? Google’s webmaster site recommends the use of nofollow in some scenarios:

Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index.

Google Engineer ‘Matt Cutts’ however suggested completely different from this stand.

Matt has advised that webmasters shouldn’t use rel=nofollow attribute when linking to any of their internal pages even if they decided not to see those internal pages in search engine results.

There is no special reason shared by him to prove his statement, but, as a webmaster, we should always say “no to nofollow” on internal links as we want our internal pages to be crawled by the search engines whenever possible.