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Why is no one linking? Thursday May 10, 2007

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Ok, this ones been bubbling for some time now but today it’s boiled over. I’ve had it with news sites which (missing the point of the internet entirely) fail to provide inline links to relevant websites.

This is something I first noted over at the BBC. They write a piece which mentions a web site like Digg but rather than link to it inline, they put a link to the website over in a column on the right. This is a pain in the back side, it flies in the face of common sense and just infuriates the user.

Even worse though is the treatment of URLs within articles by Brand Republic. Not only do they fail to link to a publishers website within the body text but they even directly print a URL without making it clickable. This is nothing short of a complete disregard for the audience.

Why would I continue to use websites like the BBC and Brand Republic when the service they provide to the user can’t even embrace the most basic fundamentals of the web?

I can only imagine that this behaviour is dictated because the news provider in question feels that providing users with easy to access links ‘out’ to relevant information will somehow diminish their traffic.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Make it easy for your users to ‘get at’ the information they’re after by placing it inline and they will feel that your website is more useful, relevant and worth revisiting. It’s not rocket science.

So, again I ask: Why is no one linking?

Posted in: Chatter

 
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  1. Rob Lewis

    May 10, 05:03 PM

    I’ve noticed this too – I think you’re right about people being scared to link out to sites – although the BBC can hardly be scared about losing traffic. I’ve also come across people who are unwilling to link to other sites because they’re worried about both losing traffic and sending traffic to competitors – but my view is that your product or service should be able to survive this sort of openess. (Does that make sense?)

    I definitely agree that linking to relevant sites is good practice, indeed for SEO it’s a useful way to show the search engines your “neighbourhood”.

  2. Stuart Swan

    May 10, 10:09 PM

    This is something that annoys me too, even worse though is when the BBC write an article on something related to the net and fail to provide a link at all. Although with the BBC, I think they want to have all external links bundled in the corner, so that they have that useless disclaimer text below: ‘The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites’, is this text really needed anymore?

  3. Joel

    May 10, 10:35 PM

    (btw – you need to alter your tabs to go name -> email -> http -> message ;))

    nathan – the biggest problem is that we have people who don’t understand the web being the editors and writers at these places and no one willing to put any time + effort (read money) for training of these people.

  4. Andrew Strachan

    May 11, 03:26 AM

    Good point Nathan. Another questionable practice I’ve seen on occasion on the BBC site is just not providing a link to offsite content at all. So what’s worse – a questionable linking practice or no link at all?

  5. Rob Lewis

    May 11, 09:10 AM

    There’s a Firefox plugin to make unlinked URLs into clickable links, so if you use that browser that might help overcome situations such as in the Brand Republic example above:

    Linkification

  6. Nathan Pitman

    May 14, 01:27 PM

    @Andrew: For me no link at all is just plain laziness, at least the BBC ‘do’ provide a link, albeit a detached one. Glad I’m not alone on my distaste for this practice!
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