The other month I wrote a post about The Guardian’s poor linking practices. I’ve since heard that this issue has been raised internally at some level, but haven’t heard the results of this yet. Anyway, the issue hasn’t gone away, so I’m not going to stop writing about it.
Here’s a few more examples, similar to the ones I reported on last month:
-Note the link to The Telegraph’s homepage in the first paragraph. Rather than a link to the article that the sentence is directly addressing, there’s a generic link to the Telegraph homepage.
-No link to the house on Google Maps (even though the image in question isn’t there anymore).
-One internal link in an article thousands of words long. Not good enough. Where’s the link to Gawker’s amazing videos from inside Scientology?
The Guardian is getting better (see: a link to a press release, direct links to bank homepages), but they’re not quite there yet.
And actually, the issue about linking goes deeper than simply a lack of links to organisations. The Guardian shouldn’t simply be linking to organisations that it’s writing about (although that would be a good first step). For an idea of what I mean, take this article featuring an interview with The Wire creator David Simon.
About halfway through, there’s a sentence mentioning how David and his collaborator Ed Burns spent time hanging around rather inconspicuously on “the corner of Monroe and Fayette in west Baltimore.” My immediate thought here was to look up this exact location on Google Maps, and throw up the Google Street View service. Seeing the *exact corner* that Burns and Simon were hanging out on adds immense value to the article! So why the hell wasn’t there a direct link to this corner in the article? It took me 30 seconds to find it, copy the URL, and dump it in here. Here, I’ll even embed it!
The Guardian has a huge staff of writers, rewriters, editors, subeditors, resubeditors (yes, I’m making up words here), so why can’t they add a bleeding hyperlink?
Disclaimer: I love love love The Guardian. I’m only writing this because I want to improve their product!
Spalpeen :: Guardian.co.uk’s poor linking practices continue, Guardian video fixed (a bit) | 23-Jul-09 at 12:53 pm | Permalink
[...] The Guardian’s poor linking practices (which I’ve blogged about previously) continue to cripple the http://www.guardian.co.uk’s usefulness. At time of [...]