Misplaced Pages

Internal and external links

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
(Redirected from External links) Hyperlink to a resource in the same domain or website For information about internal links in Misplaced Pages, see Help:Link#Wikilinks and Misplaced Pages:Free links. "External link" redirects here. For information about external links in Misplaced Pages, see Misplaced Pages:External links.
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Internal and external links" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (June 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
This article contains instructions, advice, or how-to content. Please help rewrite the content so that it is more encyclopedic or move it to Wikiversity, Wikibooks, or Wikivoyage. (January 2016)
(Learn how and when to remove this message)

An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web page to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain. It is the opposite of an external link, a link that directs a user to content that is outside its domain.

Hyperlinks are considered either "external" or "internal" depending on their target or destination. Generally, a link to a page outside the same domain or website is considered external, whereas one that points at another section of the same web page or to another page of the same website or domain is considered internal. Both internal and external links allow users of the website to navigate to another web page or resource. These definitions become clouded, however, when the same organization operates multiple domains functioning as a single web experience, e.g. when a secure commerce website is used for purchasing things displayed on a non-secure website. In these cases, links that are "external" by the above definition can conceivably be classified as "internal" for some purposes. Ultimately, an internal link points to a web page or resource in the same root directory.

Similarly, seemingly "internal" links are in fact "external" for many purposes, for example in the case of linking among subdomains of a main domain, which are not operated by the same person(s). For example, a blogging platform, such as WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr host thousands of different blogs on subdomains, which are entirely unrelated and the authors of which are generally unknown to each other. In these contexts one might view a link as "internal" only if it linked within the same blog, not to other blogs within the same domain.

The existence of internal links are used in websites in order to navigate to multiple pages under a domain, making them a requirement if a website were to have more than one page (unless that page is meant to be inaccessible to the average visitor). Internal Links are also commonly used by web crawlers (e.g. for indexing a website for a search engine).

See also

References

  1. Eric Siu (11 October 2016). "The Difference Between External and Internal Links". Entrepreneur. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  2. "Internal vs External – Difference Between Internal and External". whatisdiff.com. 23 October 2019. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  3. Riley, Julie (2011). Microsoft Expression Web 3 : illustrated introductory. Australia: Course Technology Cengage Learning. p. 53. ISBN 978-0538750417. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  4. "Difference between External link and Internal link". GeeksforGeeks. 8 September 2020. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  5. "Web Crawlers: Browsing the Web". Archived from the original on 6 December 2021.
Stub icon

This World Wide Web–related article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Categories: