Hyperlinks are a powerful feature provided by web browsers. The original technologies designed for web promoted hyperlinks as the central mechanism for connecting pages in different sites. The concept of hyperlink is so important that it is central to the classifications used by search engines, such as Google with its page rank. Nonetheless, hyperlinks are badly misused, specially in the context of web essays, news, and blog posts.

A common idea among bloggers is that good writing for the web should be based on hyperlinks. As a result, they try to add as much hyperlinks to a web page as possible. This is sometimes used to give context to an argument, other times to provide further references.

Frequently, however, hyperlinks are misused. While hyperlinks are a good tool in many situations, I believe that in many of these cases web writers are providing a disservice for their readers.

Writing based on links is usually bad

The typical web post is written in the following way: first spend a few minutes looking for an idea, then spend one hour locating articles related to the idea, and finally spend a few minutes explaining what you think, with a good dosage of links to all the referenced posts.

This might seem as a balanced way of writing, but in reality is breaking any possibility of novel thinking. Just be sincere: unless a blogger is an expert writer and and able to spend a lot of time thinking about what has been publisher, they are just bound to reproduce bits of disconnected ideas when attempting to put together a post in this way.

In fact, I have seem thousands of web posts like this, and they don’t do anything other than requiring readers sped lots of time looking for these disconnected ideas. And I suspect that such posts are popular exactly because of this. They work as a starting point, or summary, for lots of other web sites. The typical reader will then likely bookmark or pass along this article, because subconsciously they think there is a lot of substance in it. In fact what is there is just a bunch of Google searches connected by a few words to make the whole thing work.

Hyperlinks break the flow of thought

If you provide a link, you are creating another dimension on your writing. It is similar to adding a footnote to a document. It will serve as an invitation readers to visit the footnote and get some of that new dimension.

Hyperlinks are an excellent idea when you want to promote these extra dimensions. Typical examples are technical documents, summaries, and software manuals. These are places where additional information for a specific term is welcome.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to make a point, the extra dimension is useless, because it breaks the flow of your argument. Even if it provides support, you probably don’t want people to stop reading at the moment you provide the first evidence for your ideas, correct? Similarly, it doesn’t make sense to have a link to a random page that is just related to what you’re writing.

Giving one more oportunity for readers to stop thinking

This is related to the previous reason, but has more to do with the realities of reading in a screen. There are already plenty of reasons for a reader to move to do something else in a computer. Why giving another one? If you provide a link in the middle of your sentence, you just gave an invitation for readers to leave your article, returning who knows when.

The main reason you should think about this is not that you don’t want to “share” your readers, but that you want to make a point. I guess the is also the reason you are writting an article, right?

Hyperlinks usually don’t provide what is promissed

More often than not, links are provided as a kind of service for readers, thus the implicit idea that it is good to provide them. The result, however, is usually not as good as you imagine.

For example, it is not uncommon to see pages where an author just provides links to a web searches for a topic. This is a loss of time for both the writer and the reader. Everyone knows how to do a web search, we don’t need another link with this “functionality”.

Many links point readers to generic web pages about a topic. For example, why providing a link to a wikipedia page on a subject? Like in the previous case, anyone knows how to search wikipedia. And, in most cases, the web search will bring the wikipedia page as one of the most relevant items. So, the reality of web links is that they don’t give what you want in most of the cases. Why trying to add them when they are not necessary?

Links make your document dated

A page full of links is also one that will quickly become outdated, full of unreachable and dead links in a few months. Why would you like this to happen?

Instead of providing links in the traditional way, there are some options that you can pursue:

• Don’t provide links unless you need to. For example, if I talk about the New York Times, I think it is a pretty good assumption that I don’t need to give a link. Anyone knows the URL or can use a search engine to find out.
• Provide information that can be used in a web search instead: for example, name of the author and title of the web page is all one needs to find something with a search engine. This is a more robust way to provide a reference, because the address of most web sites will change over time. Search engines make it convenient to find content even when its address changes.
• Provide links only at the end of a document: there are several legitimate reasons to provide a link. I think they can just be added to the end of a page, without any real inconvenience. Scientific papers have used this style for a long time and it makes sense in the web too. For example, I can’t count the number of times I searched a web page for a link that I couldn’t find easily. If the links were all listed in the bottom of the page it would be much easier to find them in the first place. For first time readers, it is not that difficult either. In fact it is good that they have to make the concious decision to scroll to the end of the page, because they will do so only when they feel there is a reason to get that additional information.

Summary

When not used well, hyperlinks may become a hindrance to understanding. A blog post is often a short essay, and would benefit from following these guidelines.

On the other hand when used propertly, links are a powerful tool. There are many places where links are welcome, and technical documentation is one of them. It is better to learn how to use hyperlinks properly, and make life easier for everyone.

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