Warmest Greetings,

:: Thursday, August 22, 2002 ::

Don't A href Me

Did you know the Disney site can "disable" your link to their site? (Inquiring minds want to know how they do that!) Or that sites such as the American Cancer Society, Realitytv.net, The Council of Better Business Bureaus, Verizon and many other high traffic, popular sites have strict link policies?

'Stupid' linking policies come under fire discusses the policies of media sites and others who forbid deep linking or demand certain linking restrictions.

Someone from Law.com didn't know they had restrictions. Okay......so does this mean nobody is actually checking to see who is linking? How do we know link policies are even enforced? Are there penalties for linking to Web sites who don't want to be linked to?

From the article:

"Other sites, such as the American Cancer Society, say restrictions on deep linking are in the best interests of people seeking information.
"Our policy is nothing out of the ordinary," American Cancer Society spokesman David Sampson said. "We like people to go through the main page so they find out about the right cancer, and they see the broad range of information we have here. Our aim is to support people as advocates, lead them to support groups, which if people go to a page on a new medicine, they don't see."

This problem could be solved by making usable navigation. It doesn't matter where the user lands on a search or from following links as long as there's adequate user feedback, instructions, navigation, links to the homepage, etc. Any inside page can contain user instructions that say "For further information on blah blah click here" or even a recommendation "If you arrived here via a link from another Web site, we recommend starting at our homepage for the best path to obtaining accurate information." Or something like that.

It takes more effort to be peaceful, usable, and easy to get along with on the Internet, but the alternative is court cases, bad feelings, and articles written about how stupid you are for restricting links to your Web site. If something is so important it can't be linked to, don't put it on the server. If the content is licensed, do what they do in Mission Impossible and make it "self destruct" when clicked on.

They put a man on the moon, and yet we can't manage something like links on the Internet? Crazy.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 8/22/2002 02:10:35 PM

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