Making external links appear in a new tab or window
Posted by admin on June, 8th 2010
Having links on your website to other related websites in your field makes your website more useful to visitors.
Google also favours sites that have useful external links; it’s a semi-large ranking factor which many bloggers seem to miss out as they don’t want to lose traffic.
There IS a solution luckily, a perfect balance between the SEO benefits of the external link and the traffic leak.
The [target="_blank"] attribute
Make sure that if people do click on an external link on your site they’ll open a new window or tab on their browser and not overwrite the original window (A.K.A. your website!)
<a href=”http://example.com”>Anchor Text</a>
Here’s the new tab code:
<a href=”http://example.com” target=”_blank”>Anchor Text</a>
Unfortunately this attribute isn’t strict XHTML compilable which doesn’t really matter for SEO but could matter for web designers. You can use Javascript to do the same external link job if you want to make the W3C happy.
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