What is the difference between internal and external links?

Internal links point to pages within the same domain, while external links point to different domains. This distinction is crucial for SEO analysis, web scraping, and understanding site architecture.

Internal links:

URLs like /about, /products/item, or https://example.com/contact (when on example.com) stay within your site.

Benefits:

  • Help with site navigation
  • Distribute page authority (link juice) across your site
  • Improve user experience by guiding visitors
  • Help search engines discover and index all pages
  • Establish site hierarchy and important pages

Best practices:

  • Use descriptive anchor text
  • Create a logical site structure
  • Ensure important pages are linked from multiple places
  • Avoid orphan pages (pages with no incoming links)

External links:

URLs pointing to different domains like https://github.com or https://stackoverflow.com send users away from your site.

Benefits:

  • Cite sources and references
  • Connect to useful resources
  • Build relationships with other sites
  • Potentially pass page authority (in SEO context)

For web scraping:

Internal links are valuable for:

  • Crawling the entire site systematically
  • Discovering all pages and content
  • Mapping site structure
  • Respecting domain boundaries

External links help:

  • Identify referenced resources
  • Analyze competitor connections
  • Build link graphs
  • Find related sites

Our Link Extractor automatically categorizes links as internal or external based on domain comparison, handles subdomains correctly (www.example.com vs example.com), and provides filtering options to focus on either type.

Try our Link Extractor →

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