What Is a Link?

Link and hyperlink mean the same thing. MDN describes the a tag, also called the anchor element, as the element that, together with its href attribute, creates a hyperlink to web pages, files, email addresses, locations in the same page or anything else a URL can address.

A link has three parts that matter. The destination, the URL in href. The anchor text, the words you click on. And, optionally, the rel attribute, which describes the relationship with the destination, for example whether the link is paid or was added by a user.

Depending on where it points, people speak of an internal link, to another page on the same site; an external link, to another site; and a jump link, to a section of the same page. When another site links to yours, that link is a backlink, a topic with its own entry in this glossary.

The browser follows the link when someone clicks it. Crawlers follow it on their own, and that is how they discover new pages. Google explains that, generally, it can only crawl a link if it is an HTML a tag with an href attribute. A button that moves to another page through JavaScript, without an href, may work for a person and stay invisible to the crawler.

The anchor text tells the search engine what the destination page is about. Google recommends that it be descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it sits on, and it advises against generic text such as "click here".

The rel attribute qualifies the link. Google asks you to mark paid links with sponsored, links added by users, for example in comments or forums, with ugc, and cases where you would rather not associate your site with the linked page with nofollow. Links with these values are generally not followed, although the destination page may still be crawled if the search engine finds it another way.

Links are the route search engines take across the web and the way a site shows which pages matter. Google puts it like this: every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. A page without internal links, an orphan page, depends on the search engine finding it through the sitemap.

External links count too. Linking to a reliable source helps readers check what you say, and Google advises using nofollow only when you do not trust the source, not on every external link. Links that other sites point at yours are covered in the entries on backlinks, link profiles and link building.

We measured this on this glossary's entry about HTML on 13 October 2026: it contains 143 links, of which 96 are in the navigation menu and 16 in the footer. The paragraphs of the text contain no links at all. The five related entries sit in a separate block, with the term's name and its short description as anchor text, and the three external sources at the end carry only the noopener security attribute, no nofollow.

• Build links as an a tag with an href and a real URL.
• Use anchor text that describes the destination.
• Link every important page from at least one other page on the site.
• Add links within the text when they help the reader follow a topic.
• Mark paid links with sponsored and user links with ugc.
• Check regularly for broken links and links that go through redirects.

• Links that only work with JavaScript, with no href attribute.
• Generic anchor text such as "here" or "read more".
• Putting nofollow on every external link just in case.
• Leaving important pages without a single internal link.
• Linking to URLs that redirect or return an error instead of to the final URL.