Overlinking

For advice on use of links in editing Wikipedia specifically, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking § Overlinking and underlinking.

Overlinking in a webpage or other hyperlinked text is having too many hyperlinks (links).[1][2] It is characterized by large proportions of the words in each sentence rendered as links, including links that have little information content, such as linking to specific years or dates; unnecessary linking of common words, for which the reader can be expected to understand the word's full meaning in context; linking to unrelated, obvious topics (e.g. linking to water in an article about sailing). One or more duplicate hyperlinks will almost certainly appear needlessly on the viewer's screen. The purpose of links is to direct the reader to a new spot at the point(s) where the reader is most likely to take a temporary detour due to needing more information. Providing more hyperlink samples for the same word in a short space (as in the example of this paragraph) doesn't help much.[3]

The opposites of overlinking are "null linking" and "underlinking", which are phenomena in which hyperlinks are reduced to such a degree as to remove all pointers to a likely-needed context of an unusual term, in the text-area where the term occurs.[2] This results in reader frustration. Underlinking results whenever a reader encounters an odd term in an article (perhaps not even for the first time) and wants to briefly browse more deeply at that point, but finds they cannot, but rather is required to conduct an extensive search far up near the beginning of the article, in order to locate the only instance of the word or term being linked— or perhaps even to find that it hasn't been linked at all.[citation needed]

Impact

Overlinking may deplete users' attention because it competes with all others, increasing the time of processing all possible choices, and adding extra load on users' working memory (cognitive overload).[4]

References

  1. ^ "PCMag.com Encyclopedia". PC Magazine. Archived from the original on 2012-06-14. Retrieved 2007-01-19.
  2. ^ a b Dvorak, John C. (April 2002). "Missing Links". PC Magazine. Archived from the original on 6 August 2011.
  3. ^ P. Thruesen, J. Čechák, B. Sezñec, R. Castaño and N. Kanhabua, "To link or not to link: Ranking hyperlinks in Wikipedia using collective attention", 2016 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), Washington, DC, USA, 2016, P. 1709-1718.
  4. ^ "The Same Link Twice on the Same Page: Do Duplicates Help or Hurt?". Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved 2025-06-17.

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