eMedia Daily

Denial of Deep Linking

From WalletPop….

Can you imagine a media outlet, which lives and dies by readership and distribution of its articles, prohibiting you from linking to pages within its website??? I couldn’t imagine it either, but it’s true.

BusinessWeek.com has a user agreement which prohibits readers from “deep-linking,” which essentially means you are not supposed to post a link to a specific article. You can post a link to the home page, businessweek.com. But if you find a specific story that you’d like to write about or promote, it’s a no-go. You can’t like to that specific page. From the user agreement: “In addition, User may not:…. 2. use or attempt to use any “deep-link,”…”

Deep linking is vital to search engine optimization - inbound links contribute to your Google PageRank, increasing your search engine ranking. There are entire services (like AddThis) dedicated to helping people save links to the deeper content on websites. Its easy enough to remember that you want to visit a site like BusinessWeek, but if you’re feeling inspired by something that you read their and want to share it in the blogosphere, you’re not doing your readers any favors by sending them to the homepage.

The part of the user agreement that forbids the use of bots to scrape content makes sense - that’s protecting the bulk of their content. However, by denying deep linking it seems that they’d be reducing their Web 2.0 presence. I guess they won’t have to worry about broken trackback links!