What Aspects Of A Hyperlink Are Not Important For SEO?
June 16, 2023
Rudra Kumar
Hyperlinks play a significant role in many aspects of search engine optimization, but there are a few areas where it has little or no value. Though these aspects may improve user engagement and prove crucial for aesthetics, they have negligible impact on SEO. But before we delve further, we need to get a better understanding of hyperlinks.
Simply put, hyperlinks are clickable elements within the text that allow users to navigate to other pages. Now, these can be external as well as internal pages, necessitating marketers to coin the terms internal links and external links. Furthermore, links are one of the most important SEO ranking signals, and hyperlinks play an integral part there.
Now that we have got that out of the way, let’s identify the aspects of hyperlinks that are not important for SEO.
Unimportant Aspects of Hyperlinks for SEO
Here are some factors of hyperlinks that aren’t important for SEO –
Nofollow vs Dofollow Attributes
Nofollow and Dofollow are attributes used to manage the treatment of links by search engines. Dofollow links are regular hyperlinks that search engines follow and pass the link juice. In contrast, Nofollow links tell search engines not to follow the link to its source page and pass the link juice, but these do pass authority signals, so that’s one myth debunked for folks wanting to acquire dofollow backlinks.
Now for your own web pages, you want crawlers to visit the pages by following the dofollow link and even pass the link juice. However, this should be done strategically. Let’s say you have “login” or “thank you” pages on your website. You wouldn’t want these pages to appear on search results, which is you should try to use nofollow links for them, directing crawlers to not follow the hyperlinks to its source destination.
Read more about how to noindex a webpage here.
Link Coloring and Styling
Link coloring and styling has no value in SEO. While the visual presentation of hyperlinks, such as their color, underlining, or hover effects, can impact the user experience and the possibility of a visitor/reader clicking on it, search engines don’t really consider these as a ranking factor/signal.
Some Link Attributes
From an SEO perspective, link attributes like the “target” and “title” attributes are regarded as somewhat irrelevant. The relevance, authority, and visibility of a web page are typically determined by a range of variables, not just the information that these properties can convey or the behavior of a hyperlink (such as opening a link in a new window). However, attributes like UGC (user generated content) or sponsored links can impact SEO performance directly, requiring compliance with the search engine guidelines.
Avoid Misconceptions in Hyperlink SEO Optimization
When optimizing hyperlinks for SEO, it’s important to learn the misconceptions and avoid them to develop effective strategies. Here are a few misconceptions to steer clear of:
Quality Over Quantity in Link Building
You shouldn’t place more emphasis on the sheer number of links than on their value and applicability. You must achieve the right balance. In fact, the quality of links is the first thing you must figure out while deciding on what you need to balance when doing SEO.
Balancing Anchor Text Beyond Exact Match
The overemphasis on exact match anchor text, which calls for utilizing the precise target keyword as the anchor text, is one common mistake. Search engines now give preference to an anchor text profile that is more natural and diversified, contrary to earlier beliefs that deemed it advantageous. You must concentrate on ensuring that the keyword insertion attempts do not dilute the intent or change the meaning of the text. Insert keywords organically and focus on LSI keywords.
Optimal Internal Linking Strategy
One common misconception about internal linking is giving preference to quantifying over the quality of the links. Marketers and SEO experts giving heed to this statement stand at a disadvantage. Thus, you mustn’t keep the number of internal links at the heart of your strategy because excessive internal links within a single page or repetitive links with the same anchor text may be seen as spammy or manipulative.
Focus on providing value and improving the user experience. The most ideal internal linking strategy is one that helps users navigate your website easily, improves the overall user experience, and assists search engines in understanding the structure and content of your site.
More Backlinks Can Bridge the On-page SEO Gap
When it comes to SEO, everything works in tandem. It’s not as if you can prioritize one factor over another. So even though backlinks are crucial for SEO, they should be used in conjunction with an effective on-page optimization approach rather than as a replacement.
The overall performance of SEO can be hampered by failing to fix on-page SEO elements, including good content, appropriate keyword optimization, meta tags, URL structure, and user experience. For sustainable results, a thorough strategy incorporating both on-page and off-page optimization is essential.
What Should You Focus On Instead?
💡Focus on Relevance and Contextual Significance: Ensure that the hyperlinks you create are relevant to the content they are placed in and provide valuable context to the users.
💡Focus on Anchor Text Optimization: Strategically select and optimize the text used for hyperlinks by diversifying the anchor text and achieving the right balance
💡Focus on Addressing Broken and Redirected Links: To deliver a positive user experience and prevent detrimental SEO effects, regularly examine your website for any broken or misdirected links and fix them.
💡Focus on Conducting Regular Link Audits: To keep your link profile clear and search-engine-optimized, do periodic link audits to find and remove low-quality or irrelevant links.
This concludes all the aspects of hyperlinks that aren’t important for SEO, misconceptions in hyperlinks, and what you must focus on. To succeed over the long term in the ever-evolving digital landscape, just remember that SEO is a continuous effort.
If you need experts to help, you can always connect with Techmagnate for Search Engine Optimization Services.