External links are hyperlinks within your pages that link to another domain. That means all of your backlinks—the links to your website from another one—are someone else’s external links.
See how the magic of the internet is invisibly woven together? *mind-blown emoji*
External links are often used to back up sources in the form of citations. For example, if I am writing a blog post and discussing metrics from a study, I’ll externally link to where I found that authoritative source.
Linking to credible sources makes your own website more credible to both visitors and search engines. This is because you show that your information is backed up with sound research.
Here’s what John said about external links:
Linking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users. Often times, links help users to find out more, to check out your sources and to better understand how your content is relevant to the questions that they have.
recommended name is what makes affiliate marketing such a powerful pillar of digital marketing.
John Mueller
John Mueller, Search Advocate Google
As always, just like anything else, external whatsapp number list links can cause issues. These can be found in the audit report (similar to internal links): Site Audit > All issues > Links.
External link issues via Ahrefs' Site Audit
As you can see from the image above, links are broken down into indexable and not indexable and you can find the same issues across both categories. However, each issue has a different predetermined importance level—depending on whether the link is indexable or not.
Page has links to broken page
Priority: High (if indexable)
This issue can refer to both internal and external links and simply means that the URLs linked to are returning a 4XX return code. These links damage the user experience for visitors and can impair the credibility of your site.
Page has no outgoing links
Priority: High (if indexable)
Again, this issue refers to both internal and external links and essentially means a page has no links from it at all. This means the page is a “dead end” for your site visitors and search engines. Bummer.
But in regards to external links specifically, if your page has no outgoing links, it affects all of the benefits of external links as discussed above.