Optimal number of links
Check out this article in BusinessWeek about Twitter. The article itself is pretty ordinary, but look at the spectacular number of hyperlinks it contains. In fact, there are so many links that the article is hard to read and I gave up.
I was wondering why having too many links in an article can be bad. I think it’s because when you encounter a link during reading, you have to think a little. What is this link about? Should I click it? Too many links makes for too much of this type of thinking, which makes reading the article hard. Also, the blue colour and underline of links is distracting. With so many distractions from the links, I couldn’t concentrate on what the BW writer was trying to say.
I wonder what the optimal ratio of links to words is. By my count, the BW article contains about 1,200 words and 42 links. My gut feeling says that one link per 100 words is about the maximum you’d want to have for a regular article.
(HT: Web 2.0…Really?)
9 Comments
Hi Aaron,
I would like to submit my site for your cool listing:
http://yellowroad.wallstreetexaminer.com/blogs/
Thanks,
Andy
andy: Thanks, I’ve added your blog.
I had no problem reading it at all.
Hi Aaron, Point taken on link overload. My problem was that I researched the story by asking for help on Twitter. Lots of people responded, and I wanted to cite them and lead people to their Twitter feeds. But I do see how it could get tiresome for the reader…
Steve Baker
This is a really good question. But maybe there would be another way to attribute the Twitter links by mentioning their user IDs the way you would normally do for people’s names. If they’re really interested in those people, they could probably search for them, plus you said this could all be found in Summize which links names for you.
Links are a bit distracting. It’s because they catch the eye and make it difficult to concentrate on the entire sentence. I follow Steve on Twitter and saw his post here. He’s right, you still need to give credit where due.
It is becoming more important now that more and more ocntent is linkable on the web. I thought superscripts may work, but that can be difficult in html, so what about parenthesis that are used arbitrarily after the word or phrase that would normally be hyperlinked.
E.g. instead of “this article” as a hyperlink, make it “this article (*)” and just link the (*)? It doesn’t break up flow or distract quite as much from the reading…
Anyone else have input?
@jonaspk
Wow! You really gave up? If I find the content compelling, I have no problem slogging through readabilty. Personally, I appreciated having handy access to @stevebaker’s sources & references. But that’s me.
Cheers & Happy Friday! =D
I had absolutely no problem handling the number of links in the article. I read the article straight through first and then I went back and followed the links. Via Steve Baker’s link to his own twitter page, I found this. The internet = links, links, links! It’s how it works!
You shouldn’t have to click through to get all the content from the links. I only needed to click on 1 of them (forgetting what Zappos was). I feel like in including all those links, he was able to get across the same information to a wider audience.
I imagine there’s a person who may know what tinyurl is but would not much about SXSW.