Overlinking

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Overlinking in a webpage or other hyperlinked text is having too many hyperlinks (links). It is characterized by large proportions of the words in each sentence rendered as links, including links that have little information content, such as linking to specific years or dates; unnecessary linking of common words, for which the reader can be expected to understand the word's full meaning in context; linking to unrelated, obvious topics (e.g. linking to water in an article about sailing). One or more duplicate hyperlinks will almost certainly appear needlessly on the viewer's screen. 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 hyperlink samples for the same word in a short space (as in the example of this paragraph) doesn't help much.

Overlinking in a webpage or other hyperlinked text is having too many hyperlinks (links). It is characterized by large proportions of the words in each sentence rendered as links, including links that have little information content, such as linking to specific years or dates; unnecessary linking of common words, for which the reader can be expected to understand the word's full meaning in context; linking to unrelated, obvious topics (e.g. linking to water in an article about sailing). One or more duplicate hyperlinks will almost certainly appear needlessly on the viewer's screen. 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 hyperlink samples for the same word in a short space (as in the example of this paragraph) doesn't help much. ==Impact== Overlinking may undermine users' attention and increase the time of processing all the possible choices; it thus adds extra load on users' working memory (cognitive overload). ==References== no:Overlinking

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1376904920 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.