Info Challenge

1. Internal links can quickly add context. Instead of writing a summary of some topic that you covered in detail the other day, you can just create an hyperlink to that old story and readers can follow the link in case they are curious to learn more about that topic.

2. Internal linking with good anchor text can affect your site rankings in search engines. And this is a big reason why so may sites link back to themselves so frequently.

Highlight external links, hide internal links

When I am reading a new story on some blog that I have been following for a long time, I generally tend to ignore all internal links and hunt for links that point to external website. It’s a constant battle – place your cursor over a link, look at the target location in the browser’s status bar – if points outside, click the link else move to the next one in the loop.


This is a case where too much self-linking becomes confusing as well time-wasting for the reader. To illustrate, here’s a screenshot of a story that was recently published in a popular tech blog. All hyperlinks are in green and therefore finding the external ones might require some effort.

Before: Both internal and external hyperlinks are of the same color

 
After: The external hyperlinks get highlighted
 
 

 
This is possible through a simple bookmarklet – you drag the above link to your bookmarks (or favorites) toolbar and click the link while you are on any web page.


The bookmarklet will change the colors of links on the page (without reloading) making it easy for you to distinguish between external and internal links. In case you want to revert to the previous scheme, just hit the refresh button.

The bookmarklet turns internal links to black but you can modify the source to use any custom colors.