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Overlinking in a webpage or another hyperlinked text is the characteristic of having too many hyperlinks. It is characterised by:

• A large proportion of the words in each sentence being rendered as links.
• Links that have little information content, such as linking on specific years like 1995, or unnecessary linking of common words used in the common way, for which which the reader can be expected to understand the word's full meaning in context, without any hyperlink help.
• A link for any single term is excessively repeated in the same article. "Excessive" is usually more than one link for the same term in a line or a paragraph, since in this case one or more duplicate links will almost certainly then appear needlessly on the viewer's screen. Remember, the purpose of links is to direct the reader to a new spot at the point(s) where the reader is most likely to take a temporary detour due to needing more information. Providing more link samples for the same word in a short space (as in the bad example of this paragraph) doesn't help much.

Overlinking is often due to writers who believe that the text is improved by any addition of links, and who seem to have a "regularization" obsession - that all words which are the same, should appear the same.

References: Dvorak, John C.. "Missing Links", PC Magazine, April 2002. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Overlinking". This entry is a fragment of a larger work. Link may die if entry is finally removed or merged.

# posted by Cliff Pickover @ 4:49 PM