Inbound Link
A link arriving at your site from somewhere else on the web — the mirror image of an outbound link, which leaves your site for another.
Analogy Mental model
Inbound links are customers being sent your way by someone else. Outbound links are you walking your own visitors over to a shop you trust.
In practice What you actually do
Audit the balance between the two. Pull inbound and outbound counts from a crawler and check whether links are landing on your best pages or all piling onto the homepage. A site that both earns links and cites sources reads as an active participant rather than a dead end.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Sites that hoard links and never cite anyone look insular. Linking out to a primary source costs you nothing and strengthens the credibility of the page doing the citing.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →