: Does target blank on internal links affect Google Analytics and search engines in any way? We have a news site where many articles have "Read more" links. These internal links are often set

@Bryan171

It does not impact your Google Analytics data per se.

However, I do not know whether it impacts SEO or not (since the ranking factors themselves are not disclosed).

Google has a tool called as Lighthouse which is supposed to help developers in improving the quality of the web pages. This documentation catches _blank links and frowns upon the usage as there is some security vulnerability there.

TL;DR - rethink the _blank because of the security issues it represents

Vote Up Vote Down

@Odierno851

SEO have nothing to do about target="_blank" information, They crawl pages individual.
Analytics report show you two things, first from where you're getting traffics and how user interact with your site, like bounce rate, clicks, time spent, goals etc. The other last things is not going to affect at all, because it get information from page it self. But the first thing like from where you're getting traffic is purely depend on browser HTTP header information, like HOST, Referer, User Agent, Origin, Accept-Language etc Fields. And those information will still pass when user open link in new tab. Google analytics may gives you wrong information when someone use serices like nullrefer.com because it hide original HTTP referrer information, but as I said target="_blank" does not affect anything in HTTP headers fields, so don't worry about it.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Hamm4606531

Nope! But it's not the best practice to have a link open in a new window/tab if you remain on the same site (unless it's opening up a PDF or other document). Using target="_blank" is usually reserved for external links.

Vote Up Vote Down