Links: Internal, External, Outbound & Inbound
A link or hyperlink is a clickable object on a webpage that leads from one page to another. Links may visibly appear as text, images, or buttons. We classify links based on the destination of the link; whether it leads users to another page on the same site or a different website.
Internal links are links between the pages within your own website.
External links are hyperlinks that direct the reader to a reputable page on a different website.
Outbound links are those links on your website that link out to websites with a different domain name.
Inbound links are links that come from other websites or a different domain name.
Important SEO Issues Regarding Links
- You should be linking to some external resources. Some external linking with DoFollow links, help your articles and website gain authority.
- You should be linking to other resources on your website. Internal links add value to your website.
Permalinks
The permalink is the full URL of any post, page or other piece of content on your website. It could include your domain name (www.yourdomain.com) and what's called a slug; the piece of the URL that comes after the domain name. Therefore, a permalink or permanent link is the address (URL) of a web page. It is called permanent link because it's not expected to change throughout the life time of a page.
Important SEO Issues Regarding Permalinks
- Should be short. Delete unnecessary words. The average URL on a number one ranked page is only 59 characters long.
- Avoid using a date or year in it, like "Best review 2020". It's better to write "Best review" and remove the 2020 part. The year can, however, stay in your post title, if you want.
Lastly, we shall see SEO related points with regard to content, images and a few miscellaneous issues.
Thanks for all of this tutorial.
I need to understand on the issue of Date in a URL. On WordPress, you can choose whether the month and year of publication of your article appears. I chose to have that on my initial / main website. But for my new / "extracurricular" website, I left that option out (so far). So the format of the URLs for the two websites looks thus:
https://mainwebsite.com/2020/11/hi-aparna/
https://newwebsite.com/hi-aparna/
By "Avoid using a date or year", do you mean that the URLs / permalinks of my main website are not good for SEO?
Regards
Reply
The reason why it is suggested that the year of publishing be avoided in the Permalink or URL is that when the year changes you may want to change the permalink, and that is not advisable. It's a Permanent Link for the reason that it should not change. That's how search engines expect it to be.
Suppose I write a review of Wealthy Affiliate in 2020 and name it "The best Wealthy Affiliate review, 2020". The permalink, which gets generated automatically, will be https:// mydomain/the-best-wealthy-affiliate-review-2020.
Now in 2021, this review will seem old, or not current, and therefore I may like to change the Title to "The best Wealthy Affiliate Review, 2021". But if I make a change to the Permalink as well, the article may get deindexed or may lose ratings, as Google treats it as a new article. It further gets complicated as Google now believes that the earlier article was the canonical. And there is a risk of your same article being branded an exact "Duplicate copy".
Therefore in any article which I write, I should always remove the year from the Permalink, even though I may let it remain in the Title, for reasons that I want my article to stay current in the current year (which in fact it might be).
I hope I have been able to answer your question?
Regards,
Aparna
I understand your explanation; thanks!
But I guess the example of my website that I have given, is different in that the year and month are automatically inserted into every URL by WordPress, because of the Setting I have selected. So they appear even if I have not written the year in the title. (Another Setting we can choose, is to have Year, Month and Date inserted.)
I am just wondering if that URL format is not favoured by the search engines.
Hoping I am clear,
Teboho ☺️
The point is that for a particular niche or subject, I may want my articles (and permalinks) to be relevant to the present year.
In other niches, that may not be the case.
So you have to decide whether your niche (and article titles and permalinks) are benefitted by a date or not.
Regards,
Aps
I have made this mistake in time past, before knowing that I was doing myself more harm than good
Good job
Ayodeji
In early days, I have also changed titles and therefore permalinks of a few articles. But I did that within 2-3 days, when the articles didn't rank. Unfortunately a few of them have ended up not being indexed and are labelled as "Duplicate Content" in GSC.
Should I change the titles and permalinks back to the original?
I visualised this as a pdf/ebook.
