Guidelines on Internal Links

How to add Internal Links

Internal links are links to anything belonging to The South African – any of our pieces. Every article needs to have at least four (4) related internal links, with a link inserted (in bold) after every second paragraph, in this manner:
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Rules for internal links? It’s pretty simple because nothing has to be marked. It doesn’t have to “open in a new tab”, nor does it have to be marked as a no-follow. If you’re unsure about what a no-follow link is, don’t worry, there’s information on it under the next section.

Please ensure that the internal links you insert are related to the general topic of your article. It’s a bad user experience when readers choose an article about skincare and the internal links are articles about load shedding. Additionally, it’s not a good idea for Google to crawl an article about a particular subject and the inserted internal links don’t align with that topic/subject.

So if an article is about an escaped lion, please ensure all related internal links are about lions, other animals, exotic pets, hunting etc.

 How to add External Links

External links are links that fall outside or separate from The South African – basically any link that does not start with www.thesouthafrican.com etc.

Every article needs at least one external or outbound link. The key things to remember when it comes to external links is that all of them should “open in a new tab” and only SOME of them should be marked as a no-follow. Read the section below to understand which links should be marked as a no-follow and which should not.