Comments on: Don’t link to us: part two

By: Ashley Sheridan

Ashley Sheridan — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:29:13 +0000

Forbidding deep-linking is perfectly understandable, as it is essentially stealing bandwidth. However, a large proportion of the examples in the original post don't make the distinction and want to prevent any sort of linking without permission.

My question about whether this was legally enforceable was more about whether it's actually legal to prevent links to the site (I'm not talking about deep links here) Surely freedom of speech allows links to be made to another site? This aside from a strong suspicion I have that the media-based websites in the list would probably have no hesitation linking to other sites and sources of information.

By: Malcolm Coles

Malcolm Coles — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:10:09 +0000

I'm not sure everyone would understand deep linking to mean that - many people use it mean linking to a page other than the homepage.

By: Marc Crouch

Marc Crouch — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:56:23 +0000

I just want to pick up on the deeplinking issue, which you don't seem to fully understand. "Deep linking" basically means linking directly to content (such as images) hosted on the parent site and then including the content directly on your own site; for example, using an image tag to display an image on your page but the src (location) of the image is on another site. There is a very good reason for not allowing this, as it eats up your bandwidth meaning that you end up paying for other people to use your own content on their site. It also opens doors to all kinds of copyright issues so this is a justifiable demand.

The sites that prevent any kind of external link to your homepage though... that's simply not the spirit of the internet (and furthermore is counterproductive from an SEO point of view).

By: UK Websites with No Linking Policy

UK Websites with No Linking Policy — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:07:16 +0000

[...] one being a list of UK newspapers which has this no linking policy, then the second blogpost gives another list of major UK companies including the AOP (Association of Online Publishers) permitting websites to link to them without permission. Now I [...]

By: Sites that ban you from linking to them. Still. In 2010 » malcolm coles

Sites that ban you from linking to them. Still. In 2010 » malcolm coles — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:01:56 +0000

[...] on, more than a year after I revealed that most newspapers banned deep links, as did brands like Apple, Royal Mail, Channel 4 and, er, the Association of Online Publishers (which culminated in the hilarity of my attempts to get the Royal Mail to post me the paper [...]

By: Ashley Sheridan

Ashley Sheridan — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:56:45 +0000

Is this even legally enforceable? Surely fair usage policies allow such practices?

This is entirely forgetting the fact that links to their site, no matter what pages) is a good thing and improves their ranking in search engines.

It just sounds like the sites are run by people who are still living in the 90's, where site admins liked to force people through a landing page, often containing some stupid intro animation/graphic or advert.

I'm fairly sure that plenty of people link to these sites, and aren't even aware of the draconian terms and conditions, and I've not heard of anyone getting into trouble over it (that's the sort of thing that would spread fairly quickly online!)

By: Dantiumpro

Dantiumpro — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:39:16 +0000

...the link to the Business Link template. The URL is not very friendly but the link policy of Business Link is! It appears they don't practice what they preach.

By: Dantiumpro

Dantiumpro — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:29:15 +0000

The "written consent" bit is actually in the Business Link Website Terms and Conditions template, so plenty of small businesses may have this on their site by default. Someone queried it on eseehow.com, I decided to keep it, and went on to explain why in a blog post. All the Share / Save buttons etc. serve as "written consent" to link and, although it doesn't look too friendly, it's a legal deterent to hot-linkers or illegal sites that might want to associate themselves with your name and your content. I love sharing but it's still in the T&Cs like a firewall - locked down by default, opened up to trusted applications. Just the world we live in, although there's plenty of room for "Share this" buttons. I don't think the companies in your post are doing it to be menacing - ok, I can't say for sure, but I know I'm not! Glad you posted though, gave me extra pause for thought and let me know I'm not alone - even Which? Online has it! Keep up the good work.

By: Peter Nichol

Peter Nichol — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:12:55 +0000

Wow, I had no idea that companies have it in their Terms and Conditions not to link to them.

I'd of thought that any link gets the company more visibility and so in theory has the potential of giving them more traffic - It's not like they're linking to us and giving away their link juice.

Deep site links I understand as it's quite often that a website may remove a page, and so then the old links are brining up a 404 error and resulting in the website having broken links.

By: Newspaper sites start to scrap ‘no inbound links’ policies | Online Journalism Blog

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:24:15 +0000

[...] it seems newspapers aren’t alone - there are more sites with similar conditions such as these large companies and these public sector [...]