Deep Linking, Is it allowed?

lucsaunders

Hi,

I am building a website that organises a lot of information on the net into a useful system for a certain group of users. As part of the site I plan to link to external pages with god relevant content. However my plan is to link directly to the relevant page within the external site (as opposed to just their home page).

If my site is a success, my fear is that the external site will be bothered by my site deep linking within their site.

Does anyone know can a site stop you from linking to pages within their site?

or any experience in this area?

Cheers
Luc

seamus

lucsaunders wrote: »

Does anyone know can a site stop you from linking to pages within their site?

Yes they can. Though it's more often used for hotlinking (embedding an image in your page from another site). The typical thing is that the person who clicks on the link will be redirected back to that website's homepage.

The main reason why a site would stop you from linking to items on their site is because their bandwidth is being consumed and the site is getting no benefit from it. In the case of hotlinking images, the site which is displaying the image is getting any benefit from the image, and the site supplying the image is not.

Linking directly to pages on a website is less of an issue because you are linking to their website, which drives traffic to them. Your visitor will see the external site's ads and any other beneficial content. Assuming that your website is open to search engines, this practice will also improve their search rankings. So most websites don't stop the practice of linking to pages directly on their site.

In some cases though, the external site doesn't want a page to be linked to directly - because it's supposed to be semi-private or whatever, or often because the site is set up in such a way so as to customise the content/view for each visitor, so any links directly into the site redirect back to the homepage.

There's nothing wrong with linking directly to a page on a site, it's not considered rude, or bad form or anything like that. At the end of the day, you're driving traffic to the other site and not stealing their content, so many websites see it as a good thing.

spoonface

lucsaunders wrote: »

Hi,

I am building a website that organises a lot of information on the net into a useful system for a certain group of users. As part of the site I plan to link to external pages with god relevant content. However my plan is to link directly to the relevant page within the external site (as opposed to just their home page).

If my site is a success, my fear is that the external site will be bothered by my site deep linking within their site.

Does anyone know can a site stop you from linking to pages within their site?

or any experience in this area?

Cheers
Luc

They can't legally stop you. But they could later change their file locations
so all your links become broken. Possibly they could implement something where they block pages if the referrer page is on your site. I'd say they're unlikely to do this because in the end, you are sending them traffic.

stevenmu

If you ever look at sites like Slashdot, Reddit or Digg they exist purely to deep-link content submitted by users. In general the sites that get linked love the extra exposure either for the ad revenue or even just the extra audience. In fact many content sites try to spam these sites and game their systems to get more of an audience.

Occasionally if a smaller site can't handle the extra traffic they block or redirect requests from that site temporarily but that's the exception rather than a rule.

Btw if you're plan is to omplement a mini version of one of these Reddit's software is open sourced and freely available (https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki) as is Slashdot's (http://slashdot.org/faq/code.shtml)

Trojan

Allowed, yes, desired even. You're benefiting them in terms of SEO.

seamus

Also as a nerdy aside, the creation of HTML and the use of document linking was invented, to some degree, for the purpose of "deep-linking".

With academia in mind, a full doctorate paper (for example) could be published online, free for others to access and read, and the references for that paper could not only be mentioned, they could be linked directly to, and even the specific chapter/paragraph which is referenced, could be linked to. Something of a revolution in academic terms because it removes hours and days of research time required when reading a paper.

Wikipedia is about as close as you get at the moment to the original idea of what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind.