Hyperlink guidelines for SEO

Article
10/10/2017

Each hyperlink in a page should follow these guidelines for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Explanation

A hyperlink is one of the most important elements in search-engine ranking.

Search engines use internal hyperlinks to find other pages in your site. They also use hyperlinks that point to your page from other sites to increase the authority of the sites specified in the external links. In turn, if another site links to yours, the authority of your site is increased.

Note

For more information about authority, see Understanding how search engines work.

Many sites, particularly database-driven sites, can display the same page using different URLs that include session IDs or other parameters. A canonical link communicates the preferred version of a URL to search engines.

Guidelines

Review each hyperlink in the site to make sure that it contains text that concisely describes the target page of the hyperlink.

Check each hyperlink for the following:

All anchors should include a valid top-level domain prefix (www., blog., and so on).

For more information, see WEB1054 - The anchor is not formatted consistently.
A hyperlink should not contain generic text, such as "link" or "click here."

For more information, see WEB1058 - The anchor text contains values that provide no search benefit.
A hyperlink should not contain carriage returns inside the href attribute.

For more information, see WEB1040 - The hyperlink contains an invalid character.
A relevant hyperlink should not contain the value nofollow for the http-equiv attribute.

For more information, see WEB1012 - The hyperlink contains a 'nofollow' attribute value.
A hyperlink should not include a session ID.

For more information, see WEB1015 - The hyperlink contains a session ID.
A hyperlink should not end in an ampersand character (&) for a page that doesn't have a query string parameter.

For more information, see WEB1016 - The hyperlink ends in an ampersand.
A hyperlink should contain fewer than three query string parameters.

For more information, see WEB1021 - The hyperlink contains too many query string parameters.
Each page should contain only one canonical link.

For more information, see WEB1056 - There is more than one canonical link.
The canonical link should be defined in the <head> tag of a page.

For more information, see WEB1057 - Canonical links are not defined inside the <head> tag section.

Hyperlink guidelines for SEO

Explanation

Guidelines

See also

Concepts

Additional resources