Wired is running an interesting article about the practice of so-called “deep linking”. Deep links are those that go directly to a particular article or page on a website, thereby bypassing the main or homepage of the site being linked to.
The story discusses the efforts of [i]The Dallas Morning News[/i] to prevent the small news-oriented website BarkingDog.com from deep linking to their news articles, and instead wants the site to link only to their main page.
I think it’s really quite interesting to see the changes that have occurred in the Internet as a result of the commercialization of much of the content available online. Now that Industry as a whole has accepted the Internet as a valid and often crucial component of their business, there have been many efforts trying to roll back much of what the older, non-commercial Internet was all about. In this case, it’s free access to publicly-available information.
To me, the whole argument against deep linking goes directly counter to the entire philosophy which created hyperlinking in the first place. The idea is to link one document to other documents which contain related and pertinent information. That’s what this whole “Internet thing” is supposed to be about–access to RELEVANT information.
Those opposed to deep linking claim it prevents them from being able to present their information in the manner they see fit. In other words, it may prevent visitors entering on a deep link from seeing their homepage’s advertising, which, assuming they use print advertising as their pricing model, would theoretically be the most valuable/expensive ad space on their site.
I don’t have a problem with the Internet being used for commercial purposes, nor with banner ads or other reasonably non-invasive forms of advertising. But users of the Internet do things in ways that suit them, not the ways that advertisers or businesses might prefer. Deep linking is no different than bookmarking; the whole point is to provide quick access to desired, relevant information. That’s what the Internet is all about, and that’s how it works. The argument against deep linking seems to ignore this fact, and as a result those who make the arguement seem to “just not get it”.
If people are deep linking to your news articles, be happy you’re getting FREE TRAFFIC! Duh! And if 30% of your traffic comes from deep links that bypass your homepage, I guess you might want to consider those individual article pages some prime screen real-estate, eh? Why not just turn around these supposed lemons and make lemonade? Is it this tough to figure out?
Here’s a deep link of my own to the article on Wired, if you’re interested:
[url]http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52213,00.html[/url]