Mark Humphrys - Computers and Internet - "Why on earth would I link to you?" - Follow-up page

"Why on earth would I link to you?" - Follow-up page

The article made 2 major points:

1. Directory categories provide the ideal destination for most links

• My thinking on this now: Wikipedia (in its "external links" sections) has taken over much of the functionality of web directory categories. (Though there are problems with Wikipedia.) Even if I still link to web directories, I usually now link to Google or Open Directory instead of Yahoo.

• A few months after I wrote the article, Yahoo changed all their links from   www.yahoo.co.uk   to   uk.dir.yahoo.com,   and almost all of their old links broke! I had to edit several hundred web pages to make this change.

• Yahoo have constantly re-organised their directory, causing me lots of work for linking to them.
  • I have many links to categories in Yahoo such as: http://www.yahoo.com/History/England/English_Civil_War/ But Yahoo constantly re-organises its hierarchy, such that the category has moved to: http://www.yahoo.com/England/History/17th_Century/English_Civil_War/ Now, anyone clicking on the link gets a "Category not Found" error, even though there is only one category called "English_Civil_War" in the whole hierarchy and it is obvious where it has moved to.
  • It would be a very simple matter for Yahoo to put up redirection notices, or for their search engine to check from the end of the string to see if the category has moved and at least provide a link along the lines of: "Not found. But we think you may be looking for: http://www.yahoo.com/England/History/17th_Century/English_Civil_War/", rather than forcing my users to go and search for that category again.
  • I now run such an Error Handling script on my own site.

• Other directories: Yahoo now has real competition in these other directories. Yahoo sat on its laurels as the best directory and diversified to become an all-purpose "portal" with free email, chat, news, stock quotes, etc., instead of becoming the uncatchable directory of the Internet. This allowed these directories to catch up and even in some areas surpass it. Yahoo used to be unique, but it has no unique feature any more.
  • Open Directory (dmoz.org)
    • Their Shakespeare category

  • Google directory (a licence of Open Directory, with some modifications, e.g. the list is in Google PageRank order)
    • Their Shakespeare category

  • Side-by-side comparison of the Yahoo and Open Directory Shakespeare categories.

  • Side-by-side comparison of the Yahoo and Google Shakespeare categories.

  • Side-by-side comparison of the Open Directory and Google Shakespeare categories.

  
  

• Wikipedia has become my preferred destination for links (despite its flaws).

• Wikipedia on:
  • English Civil War
    • article
  • Shakespeare
    • article

In defence of Wikipedia

2. Newspaper archives are a great way of encouraging free ads (incoming links)

In particular, I liked linking to the Irish Times.

• My thinking on this now: Linking to newspapers would be great, if only one could trust newspapers to keep their archives online.

• Consider what has happened to the Irish Times links since:
  1. Just after I wrote the article, the Irish Times moved their entire archive from irish-times.com to ireland.com and there was no simple mapping from the old URL to the new. I had to painstakingly and manually relocate all my links! This is a big assumption about the loyalty of their users - that they are willing to edit all their bookmarks and links - as opposed to just throwing them away.

  2. The Irish Times archive then changed to pay-to-view.

  3. The Irish Times later moved all its links again, from ireland.com to irishtimes.com, but this time there was a re-direct in place.

• In summary, I now prefer to link to societies, activists, think tanks, NGO's, etc. - who are probably more likely to keep their work online forever (since they want to spread their message even if it costs them some profit).