Link Blog

Most webmasters, and many SEOs as well, only see a site's internal links as navigational tools, just a way for visitors to find their way around their site. The truth is they are just as trusted, and maybe more so, as external links.

Michael Martinez makes a strong case for this theory in his article, Internal Links versus External Links.

"Links are links," Martinez writes. "Just because links are internal to a site doesn’t mean they should be trusted less than external links."

He adds that because "you nor the search engines really knows where that external link has been" the internal links are more apt to pass on some form of value since the external links go through filtration before they can pass value.

Nowhere, Martinez argues, can you find any mention that search engines filter internal links. Once a crawler finds the link it will pass some value, which he interprets to mean that the search engines trust internal links more than external links.

But this doesn't mean that internal links have more natural value than external links.

"Internal links possess no more innate value than external links," Martinez wrote, "and they may pass less value than really good external links, but they’ll pretty much pass some value and that is more than what many external links pass these days."

Here's a shocker: he will turn down a link from a high-ranking page in favor of internal links.

"Given a choice between a free external link from some obscure PR 9 Web site I’ve never heard of and 100 of my own internal links, I’ll take the 100 internal links every time without hesitation," he wrote. "I control those links. I know where they come from. I know where they point to."

But this doesn't mean that Martinez ignores external links because a site needs links from other sites to be crawled and indexed.

"I also go for external links," he wrote. "Give me a link that passes value and I won’t care where it came from. It’s as simple as that.

"The only good link is the link that passes value, and where it comes from is completely irrelevant in that respect."

This is good advice to keep in mind as you capitalize on the hard work you put into your site.