Both Read Write Web and Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type Blog featured articles today on the pros and cons of on page linking. Read Write Web asked if links were
a net negative for readers online
and wondered if
Placing links at the end of articles is more respectful of a person’s intentions and concentration.
Hmmm. Nicholas Carr was a bit more entertaining and explained his views on why links shouldn’t be in content:
Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.
Bold mine for emphasis. In case you can’t comprehend what he’s saying, there’s a study out there saying your concentration is diminished when you click a link because you’ve clicked a link. We’ll have to take his word for it since he didn’t offer us the study link and I can’t figure out which one it is from the list he left at the bottom of his post.
Read Write Web offers multiple takes on why you should leave links in content. They say:
I like to add links out to other sources at every opportunity in order to enrich what I’m writing, to broaden the conversation, and frankly because I think linking to other blogs is a good faith way to encourage other blogs to link to us. To act as if our blog is the only place online to learn about what’s important is the height of arrogance and a real disservice to readers. Internal linking is good business practice, but I think a balance is best
Bold is mine ‘cuz I like the arrogance angle but…then they have to go and mess things up with this:
Search indexing is largely powered by links, and the words linked inline are key. That’s a tough one. Links between documents are the foundation of much of the most innovative analysis being done online, but maybe those links could just be placed well away from a body of text.
Shades of 1999!!! I’m not really sure what “innovative analysis” is since there’s no link or description to help educate poor-confused-me but I do know webpages rank based on the concept of link popularity which has been around since the dawn of the engines and uses both links and content in it’s calculations. Hope that’s clear and you’ve not lost your train of thought.
If you think all this sounds a little far fetched, don’t. There’s a number of people who feel putting links at the end of the page is a better way to do it, check out my link and the comments on the ReadWriteWeb article. I’m thinking they’ll be early adopters of a warning label like this one:
SURGEON GENERAL LINK BUILDER WARNING: Outbound links can cause confusion, loss of comprehension and may complicate your pregnancy and life”
Here at the Link Spiel we’re going to stick with linking out from the body of the copy, we know our readers can handle clicking, reading, and returning to our blog. We feel the whole link clicking thing is akin to walking and talking or eating and reading, it’s possible to do it without getting distracted. Hopefully we’re in the majority with this line of thinking, I’d hate to see people change what’s natural, helpful and algorthimally efficient. Nobody puts our link baby in a corner.
Power to the people and links!
I’ve been seeing this pop up a lot lately and I suspectMarty is right that Wired started it. This is not an SEO/Link-building issue. It’s a deign issue. Make the links stand up as links but not so much that the eyes water when looking at it.
Where this could become an SEO issue is if you are trying to convince a site owner to pony up a link and they are scared that different colored text with an underline might ruin his users experience.
Really?
If you think your links are to blame, you have much larger issues to deal with.
Wow this is an interesting post, especially since I am experimenting with all these link plug-ins on my new blog. I am struggling to get this link set up correct.
Debra,
The only kind of links I want to see go away from the content are inline ads. They destroy the original intent concept of inline links, and downright pollute what might otherwise be valuable stories, articles and content in general.
To take genuine reference links out of the content is not anything I would ever support because it prevents me, the reader, from choosing whether I wish, as I’m reading something, to read that which is referenced before continuing on the originating site.
By forcing me to wait to the end of the content to then see those links just causes me to have to spend more time trying to recall the context of each link. It’s inefficient and annoying.
Claiming that having links in the content is a bad thing is hocus pocus nonsense. I’m glad Link Spiel is not going to remove links from inline. Good for you – good for your readers!
I always link out from the body of my text, but ensure that if it is an outbound link to a website that isn’t the one a reader is presently on, the link then opens in a new window so that you can follow maintain your focus until the end.
Screw concentration! If an intelligent person needs data, then links placed in relevant locations should facilitate information gathering.
LINKS ARE THE FABRIC OF THE INTERNET!!!
And I could go on and on about this…
On-page links, if used properly (i.e. links to content that is relevant and pivotal to the text), often turns an otherwise well-written piece into a digital version of that quirky teacher we all had who not only “frequently digressed”, but was easy to trigger into digressing. In other words, valuable on-page links are just begging a reader to stray.
End of page “More information”, or “Related content” links, or even call-out boxes at the appropriate places within content, makes much more sense if you are truly writing to to be read, rather than writing to join a virtual circle-jerk.
With great power comes great responsibility. People just need to learn that just because you can give links out from a page (you have too). Unless there is something of such value that deserves the user not reading the rest of the article, and clicking to another page.
I think those web heads are all just trying to build off the story Wired did in their current issue on how links on the web break your concentration…sheep.
Wired: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brain
I also like links in text and appreciate quality supportive material as you’ve done here. Yet I do find that copy with too many links does cause my frontal cortex to fire.
Anchor text appears to be the key to comprehension. If the linked text is explanatory, then I can continue reading without too much distraction, feeling comfortable enough to continue absorbing the content and review the links later.
Nice coverage of the topic, Debra.