SEO TIDBITS 2007
Deep Linking - Proving Its WorthThroughout its history, the internet has been confronted with a lot of issues and conflicts against traditional ways of information dissemination by being too accessible to the public. Many have pointed out violations to the intellectual property and copyright laws with untamed forms of expressions that others considered exploitation of freedom. Amazingly, counter statements to this criticism has been so strong as many have appreciated the remarkable convenience brought about by the internet in local and global communications. Recognizing the line between internet freedom and observance of the intellectual property law has been very complex. A very good example would be the conflicts that arise about deep linking. Strong arguments on its importance as well as against its legality are being presented and one will find differing decisions across the globe. For instance , a Texas court bans deep linking which have made internet enthusiast to comment on the judge being ignorant about the world wide web. Amidst the legality issues being thrown by some intellectual property rights devotees, many are realizing the valuable contribution of deep linking in getting traffic to your site and guaranteeing user satisfaction. As deep linking connects one site directly to the internal pages of another site instead of the homepage, it caters to better user usability and satisfaction in their searches. It is really more convenient to be linked directly to the articles and products you are looking instead of navigating from the homepage of the site. However, we know that site owners want visitors to know them more and their company that might be compromised by deep linking. To remedy this problem, you can place the company name and logo in each page of the site. Also, have a direct click link to the homepage. And, for easy navigation, have a search tool bar in each page. In addition, a sitemap is a great help in informing where he is at the moment and in guiding him where he wants to go. Site owners can also place link at the page for related information that could be found on other pages of the site. However, do not place unrelated and irrelevant links in the page that might mislead and confuse the user. As you can see you can make amendments in exchange for the confidence of the customers on you with the help of deep linking. However, it is not advisable to have deep linking on all of your the pages. If you incorporated an evaluation page about your site, it demerits the purpose if viewers are directed to it at first visit without going through your site. In that case, you have to prevent search engines from creating deep links to that site. You can do it by typing on the top of the page. You may also modify the site to prohibit access to that page if the user has not visited the valuable pages of the site. The additional burden is to make the restriction program very accurate to avoid inconvenience to visitors. About the issue whether deep linking is search engine friendly, Google for instance gives high PR for internal site via deep linking. You can search on Google for a certain keyword and take a look at one of its deep links and you will see impressive PR for the page. On some webmasters' point of view, deep linking is a very helpful way of facilitating online traffic and user convenience. We then can't blame internet users for asking "What's wrong with deep linking?". Most relevant information that users need are not found in the homepage anyway. Why not we respect people's judgment as to which part is relevant for them to link with. |

