Internal linking, or creating links that point to some of your own web pages, is generally practiced on sites for three reasons:
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
The second screenshot is of the same story but now anyone can figure out the external links because they are highlighted in blue while the internal links were changed to black or grey.
» Highlight External Links – Drag to the bookmarks toolbar
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.
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