What to put on a useful links page

A useful links page is a short list of outside websites that help your visitors with something your own site does not cover. Kept short and current, it saves people a search. Left alone for years, it turns into a list of dead links.

Updated

When a links page is worth having

If none of these apply, link to outside sources inside your articles instead. A link next to the sentence it supports helps the reader more than a separate page.

  • Your visitors keep asking the same where-do-I-find questions, such as forms, regulators, suppliers or documentation.
  • You work in a field where official sources matter: health, law, education, local government.
  • Your team needs one place for the tools everyone uses.

What to include

  • 5 to 20 links. Past that, split the page by topic.
  • A group heading for every 3 to 7 links, named after the visitor's task: "Apply for a permit", not "Miscellaneous".
  • One sentence per link that says what the visitor gets there.
  • The name of the organisation as the link text. "Click here" tells neither a reader nor a search engine where the link goes.
  • The date you last checked the page.

An example entry

This is the whole pattern. A heading, then the link with a plain description.

<h2>Check your website</h2>
<ul>
  <li>
    <a href="https://pagespeed.web.dev/">PageSpeed Insights</a>
    Google's speed test. Shows what slows a page down.
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="https://validator.w3.org/">W3C Markup Validator</a>
    Finds errors in a page's HTML.
  </li>
</ul>
<p>Last checked: October 2026</p>

What to leave out

  • Links you added in exchange for a link back. Google treats large-scale link exchanges as link spam.
  • Paid links without a label. A paid link needs rel="sponsored".
  • Sites you have not opened yourself.
  • Your own pages. The navigation already links to them.

Does a links page help SEO?

Linking to good sources does not cost your site any ranking. It shows readers and search engines where your information comes from.

The page itself rarely ranks for anything except its own name, because thousands of sites have a page called "Useful links". Give it a specific title such as "Resources for first-time landlords in Vienna" and it can rank for that topic.

Leave the links as normal followed links. Add rel="nofollow" only to a site you do not want to vouch for, and ask whether that site belongs on the page.

Meta Tags CheckerInspect all meta tags including title, description, Open Graph, Twitter cards, and canonical URL.

Keep it alive

  1. Open every link twice a year. Remove or replace the ones that return an error or redirect to something unrelated.
  2. Update the last-checked date.
  3. Add the new sources your visitors asked about since the last check.

Tools for this guide

All tools →
Meta Tags CheckerInspect all meta tags including title, description, Open Graph, Twitter cards, and canonical URL.Google Indexing CheckerCheck robots.txt and sitemap.xml together to spot indexing issues before Google does.Canonical URL CheckerCheck if the canonical URL tag is properly set and matches the final URL.

More guides

All guides →
Guide100 useful websites, sorted by what you need them forA list of 100 useful websites for images, files, writing, learning, code, site owners, privacy and everyday tasks. Every link checked in October 2026.Guide24 useful web tools that work without an accountA list of useful web tools you can open and use right away: no account, no install, no watermark. Grouped by images, data, site checks and everyday jobs.GuideHow to build a campaign URL for Google Analytics 4How to build a campaign URL for Google Analytics 4: which UTM parameters to add, a worked example, where the data shows up in GA4, and when not to tag.