Link Terminology

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. The SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hi there, this is Ed here, just making a comment for the podcast you're about to listen to. It's all about terminology of links. This podcast and I make a boo-boo. I refer to followed links or do follow links as naked links. I don't know why, because a naked link is something completely different. A naked link is one where the anchor text is the same as the URL. So, apologies, I could have re-recorded the whole podcast, but that seemed like a complete waste to do it all from scratch just because of one mistake. So whenever I say naked link, what I mean is a followed link or a do follow link. The rest of the podcast, almost complete sense. So I hope you enjoy. Hello and welcome to episode 97 of SEO is not that hard.

Today I'm going to be talking about link terminology. Now, this topic was inspired by a listener to the podcast called Steve, who's from Louisiana in the US, and he dropped me an email asking me some questions about backlinks and the different terminology. So he was saying he was trying to better understand backlinks. He said he understood internal and external linking, but backlinks are still a little bit fuzzy. So now Steve here is at the beginning of his SEO journey, and this is a time where it's particularly hard trying to grasp all the different terminology that comes along with SEO. It's the same with any industry. Now every industry's got its own terms, its own jargon, and SEO is no different to any other with this. So let's just talk about links.

Okay, so the very basic point what is a link? Well, a link, and they're officially they're called hyperlinks, but everyone just calls them links. It's a, it's a reference on a web page. That is a clickable element and it references another web page. When you click it, you land on the other web page. We're all familiar with what a link is from using the internet, but there are different types of links as far as we in SEO are concerned. So let's just go through them.

The first one is a backlink. Now, a backlink, which can also be called an inbound link, is a link from a page on a third-party website to a page on your website. So if another site links to you from one of their pages to a site on your page, that is backlink, that's your backlink to your site. The next one are internal links. An internal link is a link from a page on your site to another page on your site. That's simple. Third type is external links. So that's an external link. Also, some people call them outbound links. Now, that's a page where you link a page on your website to a page on a third party website. So your external link is the third party website's backlink. And then the fourth one is a broken link. Now, a broken link is a link from a web page, whether it's on your site or on somebody else's site, that links to a page that just doesn't exist. Now, that may be because the page never existed, they just mistyped the link, or it could be that they're linked to a page and then that link the page they're linking to has since been removed. So that's the kind of the four different kind of links backlinks, internal links, external links and broken links, because this is SEO.

We can obviously complicate this a bit more because we can actually now create different kinds of all these links by adding a relationship attribute to them. A relationship attribute is something that allows us to give Google a little bit of extra information as to what kind of link it is and what our relationship is with any page that we're linking to. And there are four kinds of link options. I mean, really, there's only three, because one is not having any of them, but you know I see it as four. So the options for attributes we've got are sponsored. We can label a link as being sponsored if we've got a commercial relationship with the page that we're linking to. Now, as we know, google doesn't like people manipulating backlinks for the purposes of manipulating search engine results, and they consider if you're linking to any site where there's a commercial relationship where you're going to benefit either financially or in kind, then they don't want to include those links in the link graph where they calculate page rank and then calculate search rankings. So we can label these links as sponsored, and this is where we're saying to google up front yeah, we've got a commercial relationship here, whether they've been paid for the link or whether we're an affiliate relationship. We can just say straight out there's a commercial relationship here, don't count this link for search ranking. And this means google will do what you ask. It won't count the link for search rankings and they also won't ever come back to you and say you know you're, you're manipulating search rankings by selling this link or having a affiliate relationship. You're basically saying this is what we're doing, it's all above board and google says that's fine, we'll just ignore these.

Second sort is ugc. Now the ugc label stands for user generated content and this is where you can label links in any user generated content on your site. So say, if you've got a forum and you've got forum posts which your users generate, you don't want to be liable for anything that they link to there. You're essentially saying to Google this is a link on our site that's been generated by a user of the site, not by the owner or the author. So again here, google. You're saying to Google I don't vouch for this link link. So it's up to you, google, whether you do or don't count this link for page rank purposes. And if it links somewhere dodgy, then you know we're not batching for this link. We're not batching for the dodgy site. Please don't penalize for anything any of that. So this is essentially just you just turn to Google that you don't really vouch for this link and Google's got to make its own decisions and not have any comeback on you.

The third sort is a no-follow attribute. Now this is the one that's more well-known because it's been around longer. No-follow used to be the only attribute that you could add as far as Google was concerned, and basically that goes back to the early days when they were trying to combat link spam and they came up with this no-follow link. Trying to combat link spam, and they came up with this nofollow link, which was for anyone who was selling links or had a relationship with affiliate relationship or if they were wanting to link to a site without passing page rank for whatever reason. And google invented a nofollow link. You can use it still, like for any. Any place where you might use sponsored or UGC, you can still use nofollow. You don't have to change old nofollow links to sponsored links if there's payment involved.

And this is just another one where you can say I don't vouch for the place I'm linking to, I don't want you to pass a page around Google and you might use this, for example, if you were linking from a blog post to another website which had a. Maybe they, maybe they disagree. You disagreed with the point of view this website had, but you wanted to link to it while you talked about it, but you didn't want to pass page rank. You can use a no follow for things like that. Now the third, sorry, the fourth attribute. The final attribute is not adding any attributes. Now that's what's called either a naked link. Some people call it a do follow link, because essentially, this is the one where you're saying to google I want to pass page rank to this site. I'm linking to this site because I think it deserves a link. I have no commercial relationship with this. This is just me really wanting to do something good for this website. So send them a link, send them page rank. This is the kind of link that Google wants to count and this is what it uses for making rankings. And, yeah, it has to have a name for it because to differentiate it from all the others. So that's what's a naked link or a do follow link.

Now, I know information and you're very well aware of it, but I don't want the fact that I mean, it's become very relevant to me this past few days because for the past week or so I've been working on a lot of content for keywords people use. We've created a massive glossary of SEO terms because I just started sitting down and building a glossary and I thought it wouldn't take long, but it's now, I think, over 20,000 words split over a whole bunch of pages and hundreds and hundreds of different terms. And yeah, it just amazed me how many different terms there were for so many things, like when we've got external links, also called inbound links, and backlinks also called I've forgotten myself now inbound outbound links. So, yeah, creating this huge glossary actually, you know, reminded me of a few things, um, even though it's digging up knowledge from way back. So I don't think there's any problem with going over some of the stuff.

Like this if you're interested in seeing that glossary um, put a link in the show notes and I'll also put a link in the show notes to a um, a link guide that I'm working on. Um, again inspired by steve Steve's question, because when I answered him via email, I created a little diagram and I fleshed that out and put that on the web page and put all this information about the different relationship attributes and also technically how you implement those, because it's hard to in the podcast, explain how to do those in html and yeah, so have a look at those and any comments on the design, on the content. Any feedback would be most well, most welcome and obviously, if anyone has any questions, do get in touch. I'm happy to cover any questions on the podcast. Um, so, yeah, hope to hear from you Before I go. I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that, you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

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