Internal Links: They’re Bad, Really?
(Source) There are good reasons to use internal links (I think the one I used above is a good one), but overall, it is just a sleazy practice meant to do nothing else but keep people on your property. To me, the idea of a link is to send people away and have them come back for more.
I must admit, I don’t understand this at all. If it can be proven that internal linking keeps people on your website longer and leads to increased revenue (which it does) then why should anyone object? Is it because they aren’t getting the revenue and the traffic? Is this a type of professional jealousy?
The last sentence – about sending people away so they’ll come back for more – is just naive. There’s no reason to believe that if you send people away from your website that they will come back for more. If they’re browsing and just stumble upon your website then it is likely they won’t come back as there is no guarantee that they will ever find you again. It’s not that I’m against external linking. I’m not. But it has been proven that internal linking has SEO benefits, increases traffic to all of your pages, keeps people on your website longer, and leads to increased revenues. My question is, what could be wrong with any of that?
5 Responses to “Internal Links: They’re Bad, Really?”
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“Sploggers”…you crack me up.
Isn’t internal linking, linking on within your own site? Page to page? So you aren’t sending people away right?
Yes, that’s correct. An internal link is a link between two pages on your own website. Evidently some people have a problem with that.
Vale, what’s with the splogger comment?
Anyway, If I’m selling something at a website, there are two ways to exit. The buy button and the back button.
If I have an informational website, I’ll do external linking to places that will help my readers and are also related to my topic and then only opening in a new window. Of course we want them on our site longer.
Whoever doesn’t think so, I’d love an explanation why I would put a traffic hole in my website that leaks out all the traffic I work herd to get.
The sploggers comment.