What is a Hyperlink?
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A Hyperlink is an
Invisible Connection Point
This is the first post in my “Internet Business Definition” series that will run every Monday on Art of Money.
I thought it was only fitting then to start at the beginning with the absolute foundation of the web: the hyperlink.
Without the hyperlink gathering information on the web would be more like visiting a library than than the multi-directional, mind numbing, multi-tasking, aneurysm causing treat that it is for me everyday.
What is a hyperlink?
A hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference in a hypertext document to another document or other resource. As such it would be similar to a citation in literature. However, combined with a data network and suitable access protocol, it can be used to fetch the resource referenced. This can then be saved, viewed, or displayed as part of the referencing document.
So what is it really?
Well the idea of a citation is what has created the modern day search engines. Google started counting hyperlinks pointing to a document as a “vote” or referral from the site that the hyperlink was on, to the site that it pointed at.
Google then had a way to determine the importance of a document [web page] based on the number of links that were pointing to it and it used the text of the link [in the example above it is the word "definition of hyperlinks"] as one of the ways to determine what topic the destination page is about.
This is a very over-simplified picture of a search engine and it would work great, until money gets involved in the picture - isn’t everything like that?
What if there was financial incentive for me to link to a page?
Now the “citation” concept becomes skewed, and the hyperlink becomes hyper unreliable as a method for the search engines to value a site, since the linking agenda is not known.
Enter the trust system.
Google, and all the other major search engines, then began to assign a concept of trust to a site, and therefore the links on a site. Then they began to value links based on the trust level of the site that the link was from.
The simple hyperlink is now burdened with the concept of trust.
To try and find a way to further refine the “value” of a link Google then created something called the “nofollow” tag. This is an attribute that webmasters can assign to a hyperlink to instruct search engines not to follow the link.
There are two ways to look at a nofollow tag:
1.) It defines the link as “for human consumption only.” To a human visitor the link functions as any other link…click it and go somewhere.
2.) It defines the link as “untrustworthy.” For example all newer versions of WordPress and almost all other blogging platforms, assign the “nofollow” tag to all hyperlinks in comments automatically.
Therefore when you add a comment to another blog with your URL in the hyperlink, it only serves the purpose of allowing readers of the blog to visit your site; it has no power to increase your search engine ranking, since the search engine considers that type of link unreliable and ignores it.
That’s today’s Internet business definition: the humble hyperlink.
It’s the whole foundation of the web and it seems good to ponder it’s meaning once and a while.