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How Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon Warped the Hyperlink (wired.co.uk)
The concept of the hyperlink was first outlined over 70 years ago and eventually became a central part of the web. But 30 years since the invention of the world wide web, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have skewed the original ambitions for hyperlinks, who they are for and how far they can lead you. From a feature story: The impact that Google's PageRank algorithms have had on how the commercial web chooses to deploy hyperlinks can be seen in just about any SEO (search engine optimisation) blog. Publishers and businesses are encouraged to prioritize internal links over external links that may boost the competition in Google's rankings. "Since the very moment Google came on the scene, links moved from being the defining characteristic of the web, to being a battleground. Google's core insight was that you could treat every link as, essentially, a vote for the site," says Adam Tinworth, a digital publishing strategist. Tinworth explains that Google tries to minimize the effect of these 'unnatural linking patterns', which includes comment spam and 'guest posts', but it remains part of "how the shadier side of the SEO industry operates."
With clear, financial incentives to serve Google's web spiders, which regularly 'crawl' website content to determine its placement in searches, a common strategy involves placing hyperlinks on specific 'anchor text' -- the actual words that you click on -- that benefit that site's PageRank for keywords rather than tailor links to readers. That's not inherently a problem but research from the University of Southampton, published in February, suggests it doesn't go unnoticed. [...] In the cases of Apple and Facebook, the question isn't so much how we link and how we react to them, as where we can link to and where we can follow links to. Apple News, Facebook's Instant Articles and Google AMP all propose variations on limited systems of linking back to sources of information. As for Instagram, it's based on a two-tier system: users can't add external links to posts (#linkinbio) unless they buy adverts whereas accounts with a large number of followers are able to add external links to Stories.
With clear, financial incentives to serve Google's web spiders, which regularly 'crawl' website content to determine its placement in searches, a common strategy involves placing hyperlinks on specific 'anchor text' -- the actual words that you click on -- that benefit that site's PageRank for keywords rather than tailor links to readers. That's not inherently a problem but research from the University of Southampton, published in February, suggests it doesn't go unnoticed. [...] In the cases of Apple and Facebook, the question isn't so much how we link and how we react to them, as where we can link to and where we can follow links to. Apple News, Facebook's Instant Articles and Google AMP all propose variations on limited systems of linking back to sources of information. As for Instagram, it's based on a two-tier system: users can't add external links to posts (#linkinbio) unless they buy adverts whereas accounts with a large number of followers are able to add external links to Stories.
They don't understand how Google works anyway. It's a trade secret and they are almost certainly wrong.
Plus they are making their own sites more shitty. When I read an article about something on the web, I expect a link. If you don't have a link to it you probably screwed up, except for rare cases where there is some reasonable justification.
Google probably knows that that likely down-ranks sites that are all internal links and no external ones.
SEO is the worst kind of shit shovelling. Make a good site, people will come. SEO a site and it will just degenerate into clickbait crap.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
skewed the original ambitions for hyperlinks, who they are for and how far they can lead you
The original "ambition" for hyperlinks was always, and will always be, curtailed by the dreaded 404. The instant you are relying on resources outside of your control it is just a matter of time before they are gone. That wonderful chain of links that lead you "far" is broken by one single 404 in the chain. Search engines bypass this exact problem by allowing us to directly access the destination without having to jump "far" through many links. The internet really could never have functioned very well as originally envisioned, where it was a huge collection of documents that referenced each other and provided gateways to new things to be discovered. An endless series of rabbit holes to keep going down and down. Maybe that''s fun on some level, but the usefulness quickly diminishes with the depth. At some point someone was going to start indexing things in a single collection to allow direct access - that was inevitable and was a required optimization. Search engines became hugely popular because they are very useful, and provide a solution to a weakness and limitation of pure HTML / HTTP.
Better known as 318230.
One "evolution" I could live without is the idea of replacing hyperlinks with proprietary Javascript. In the HTML, the hyperlink looks normal, but scripting is used to "disable" the browser's standard navigation and allow the script to handle events. The result is that a large number of web pages work like those old Flash sites, where standard browser navigation doesn't work. You know, so you can't open links in a new tab/window, and you can't "Copy link location".
You'd think with the death of Flash, we could finally get away from breaking standards for the sake of propriety crap in the name of innovation. Nope. All these UX idiots don't understand why the web was designed as a document-centric architecture and why it's better, and they keep trying to force things to be application-centric. That's why they keep breaking everything.