Internal Links: They’re Bad, Really?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 21 of October , 2007 at 4:45 pm

(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?

Category: Internal Linking

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