Overlinking and Underlinking
Comments(0)Overlinking
Overlinking in a webpage or another hyperlinked text is the characteristic of having too many hyperlinks. It is characterized 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 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.
Underlinking
The opposites of overlinking are null linking and underlinking, which are phenomena in which hyperlinks are reduced to such a degree as to remove all pointers to a likely-needed context of an unusual term, in the text-area where the term occurs. Underlinking results whenever a reader encounters an odd term in an article (perhaps not even for the first time), and wants to briefly browse more deeply at that point, but he or she cannot without an extensive search of the article for a (possibly non-existent) instance of the linked term. The extreme case of underlinking is a dead-end page, a page with no links at all. Usability experts discourage making dead-end pages.
