useit.com ![]() ![]() |
| Search |
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, March 3, 2002:
Summary:
Links that go directly to a site's interior pages enhance usability because, unlike generic links, they specifically relate to users' goals. Websites should encourage deep linking and follow three guidelines to support its users.
Some Internet marketing managers just don't want hot leads to visit their website. I conclude this after hearing that website owners actually call search engine customer service departments complaining that users are daring to enter sites directly on pages they're most interested in. These callers would prefer search engines that link users only to the homepages and never to pages inside the site.
Ticketmaster even filed a lawsuit to get other websites to stop sending users directly to interior pages where users could buy tickets to specific shows. In contrast to these cases, most websites treasure such direct and deep links, and pay dearly for affiliate programs that encourage other sites to send them targeted traffic.
These sites understand what our study of e-commerce usability showed: Difficulties in getting from the homepage to the correct product page accounted for 27% of the failures (averaged across 20 sites). On average, better usability can double an e-commerce site’s sales, so preventing deep linking would eliminate about a quarter of the potential sales from visitors arriving from search engines. These visitors are the hottest leads because of their current, specific interest in your products; you really don't want to lose their business.
Deep linking enhances usability because it is more likely to satisfy users' needs. Generic links, such as links to a company's homepage, are less useful than specific links that take users to an individual article or product.
Now that we finally have effective Web-wide search engines, users will likely use them more often to locate deep links to a specific solution, rather than starting out at a company's homepage.
Here are three guidelines for enhancing usability for users who enter your site at interior pages:
An example from my own site: I have an exercise that asks readers of my homepage guidelines to evaluate the improvements in the recent redesign of the BBC's homepage. The exercise consists of two pages:
It's easy to prevent search engines from deep linking to a specific page. Simply include the following meta-tag code in the HEAD part of the page:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">
Well-behaved search engines will exclude any such page from their databases.
Deep linking from non-search sites and from misguided search engines can be prevented by some fancy server-side programming that checks whether a user has been to the appropriate higher-level page before entering the sensitive page. I don't recommend this, however, because of the high likelihood of getting it wrong and preventing access by legitimate users. If a third-party website is so stupid that it links to a useless destination, then it's probably such a bad site that it has very little traffic anyway.
Deep linking is your friend: It gets users to their preferred destination as quickly as possible. Thus, you should only use the "noindex" meta-tag for pages that users should never visit first.