How to Make external links open in a new tab on webflow for SEO?

External links that open in the same tab are a navigation decision that often works against the reader. When a user clicks a source link or reference in the middle of reading your content and gets taken away from your page, they've lost their place. Most don't come back.

Setting external links to open in a new tab preserves the user's reading session. They finish reading your content, then check the linked source in the new tab if they want more detail. This is how most readers expect external links to behave, and deviating from it without a specific reason usually hurts time-on-page metrics.

From an SEO perspective, time on page and engagement metrics aren't confirmed ranking factors, but they correlate with pages that rank well. A page that consistently sends users away never to return has a structural problem that shows up in how Google interprets user behavior signals.

In Webflow, setting a link to open in a new tab is done in the link settings panel. Select the link element, click the link icon in the right panel, and check "Open in new tab." For links in rich text fields in the CMS, the same option is available in the link configuration within the rich text editor. If you've added external links via HTML embed, add target="_blank" to the anchor tag and include rel="noopener noreferrer" for security — this prevents the new tab from having access to your page's window object, which is a real security consideration with target blank links.

The exception: links to pages on your own site should almost always open in the same tab. Internal navigation that opens new tabs is disorienting and breaks the expected browser behavior (back button doesn't work as expected).

Keep internal links in the same tab. Send external links to a new tab. It's a simple rule that most sites get backwards or inconsistently.