Links – The Annoying ‘Click Here’ Habit
February 4th, 2009 // 1:03 pm @ Fox
There are 1,310,000,000 results found if you search on Google for the phrase ‘Click here’. That is over one billion web pages that use this phrase. Quite incredible!
The use of this phrase started way back when the Internet was new and the general user did not understand how to navigate from one page to another, or understand what a link was. Often links were quite hard to find as they did not necessarily appear as they do now, and the user didn’t understand that you could click on the old blue coloured text to go to another page.
Usability and accessibility concepts were still in the future, so to make it really clear to the user what to do, the ‘click here’ phrase was implemented to identify where a link was.
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Or my favourite, that one that thinks the user is a mind reader:
Usability, accessibility, search engine optimisation and good old logic came into the fray and it became recognised that the link should have descriptive text to describe where the link goes. Internet users today are savvy and understand what a link is.
Contextual link text are the words contained within the link that have meaning to the user and a search engine. ‘Click here’ does not tell a search engine what the link is going to. The link text is like a sign-post telling search engines such as Google what is on the linked page. In the case of a ‘click here’ link, it is telling Google that the next page contains information about ‘Click here’.
The above examples of links would be better if the click here was removed and the link text displayed:
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If you feel your users are really not that bright and still may not get it, then leave the ‘Click here’ if you have to, but move the link text so that it is descriptive link text.
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Click here to read the case studies
The ‘Click here’ is one of my pet hates. If I am on a website and see this, I leave.