Deep linking is a technique which has had its critics in the past, and, in fact, was subject to a lawsuit involving Ticketmaster, nearly a decade ago. Ticketmaster sued a rival company known as Tickets.com in the United States District Court of California claiming Tickets.com featured links which took consumers deep within Ticketmaster’s site, bypassing home pages. When the courts were finished with the case, the bottom line was that while it was fine to link to another’s home page, deep linking without permission was a definite no-no. So, all these years later, where do we stand with deep linking, and is it beneficial to your site?
What is Deep Linking?
A “regular” link points to the home page of a website, such as yahoo.com, while a deep link points to a specific web page inside yahoo. In the same manner, a regular link would point to Facebook.com, while a deep link would take you to a specific member profile or specific page within Facebook.
What’s So Bad about Deep Linking?
Larger companies discourage deep linking into their website, feeling it sends visitors directly to a specific page they are interested in, bypassing sponsor advertising or other features that are fiscally beneficial to the company. In other words, although the user is getting exactly what they want through following a deep link, the company may not be getting every last penny they possibly can from consumers.
In some cases, deep linking can also be considered detrimental to the company being linked to simply because they have their web pages in a certain sequence, and that specific sequence is necessary to gain the maximum benefit from the site. If someone posts a deep link to page 17 which bypasses the prior pages which are leading up to 17, then the user has potentially lost some of the value of the site.
What’s Great about Deep Linking?
In fact there are many exceptional benefits of deep linking; it has been definitively shown that getting from a homepage to a specific product page contributes to over a fourth of the failures in getting a user to purchase a product. When deep linking is incorporated, the user does not have to spend inordinate amounts of time navigating a company’s unwieldy website in search of a specific product. When users are taken directly to the information they are looking at, then the conversion rates go up significantly, whereas if the link is only to the homepage of a company, the user must take many more steps to find the exact product they are looking for.
Even though companies might be losing out on the user seeing the initial advertisements on their home page, the payoff generally offsets that minor disadvantage many times over. Many of us have suffered through such a situation: we want a simple item such as a recipe for chocolate-chip cookies. After typing the words into the search bar, we are taken to a homepage that wants us to do many more things, and wants to give us the royal runaround before finally giving us the recipe we wanted. It can be extremely aggravating for consumers with limited time who merely want what they want in the most expedient manner possible.
Deep linking can boost your website’s page ranking, and, if done in an ethical manner is not only perfectly legal, but can also improve the site you are linking to by providing enhanced customer satisfaction to users.
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