They are two things with the same popular name and quite different roles. Confusing them leads to a common waste: earning links from outside with great effort and leaving them trapped on a single page.
Backlink: comes from outside
Another site points to yours. It is a third-party recommendation, and that is why it weighs: you do not control it, so faking it is hard. The details are in what are backlinks.
Internal link: connects your own pages
You control it entirely, and it does three things:
- Helps search engines find your pages. A page no link points to is an orphan page, and it may never be discovered;
- Distributes the reputation that arrived from outside. If your home page received ten backlinks, it is the internal links that carry part of that strength to the pages that sell;
- Explains the hierarchy. Whatever receives links from everywhere is understood to be important.
The common waste
Many sites concentrate all their backlinks on the home page and never link the home page to the pages that actually matter. The reputation arrives and stops there.
Fixing it is cheap: from the home page, point to the main pages; from each article, point to the topic guide and to related articles.
In practice
The two complete each other. Backlinks bring authority from outside; internal links decide what to do with it. A site with good backlinks and poor internal structure shows up less than it could.
For the outside part, publishing your listing across a network of search sites like Magneth is the organised route. For the inside part, it is a matter of reviewing the links on your own pages — and that costs nothing.
