"Why on earth would I link to you?" - Follow-up page
My article
"Why on earth would I link to you?"
considered who I linked to from 1994 to 1999 and why.
It singled out Yahoo and the
Irish Times as major destinations
of my links.
Here's what happened to my links since 1999.
The article made 2 major points:
1. Directory categories
provide ideal destination
for most links
In particular, I liked linking to the Yahoo Directory.
-
My thinking on this now:
Now I tend to link to
Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, in its "external links" sections,
has taken over much of the functionality of web directories.
(Though there are problems with Wikipedia.)
- The long decline of the Yahoo Directory:
- A few months after I wrote the article,
Yahoo changed all their links from
www.yahoo.co.uk
to dir.yahoo.com,
and almost all of their old links broke.
I had to edit several hundred web pages to make this change.
- Over the years,
Yahoo constantly re-organised their directory,
with no re-directs,
causing me lots of manual work to fix the links.
-
I had links to categories in Yahoo such as:
http://www.yahoo.com/History/England/English_Civil_War/
But
Yahoo constantly re-organised its hierarchy, such that the category moved to:
http://www.yahoo.com/England/History/17th_Century/English_Civil_War/
Now, anyone clicking on the link gets a 404 error,
even though there is only one sub-category called
"English_Civil_War" in the whole hierarchy.
-
These problems rarely occur with Wikipedia.
The article will always be
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War.
Though sometimes categories move with no re-direct.
- Finally, Yahoo Directory shut down.
-
Other directories:
Yahoo got
competition in Google Directory and Open Directory.
I linked a lot to these for a while, but they are both now gone.
- Wikipedia:
Wikipedia has since taken over as my preferred destination for links
(despite its flaws).
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:
-
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.
-
The Irish Times archive
then changed to pay-to-view.
- 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.
Ancient Brain