Deep Linking

[Yvonne Reynolds]

One disadvantage of deep linking which the AlertBox article does not mention, is that one is locked into a  site design.  If you redesign your site and move pages- all those deep links are not going to work and you will have a lot of unhappy people thinking your site has closed down. 

 You can try to force a reindexing by the search engine  robots, but it is not as easy to alert all third parties who may  have created links to your "deep pages", or individuals who have bookmarked deep pages. 

 You can put redirects on all the pages which have moved, but if you have a big site this can get really messy!  And if you redesign again a few years later...!

I am not sure if there is an easy answer to this one and although deep links have many advantages, they don't come without costs.  The alertbox article  is rather one sided in my humble opinion.



Yvonne Reynolds
Website Manager
National Botanical Institute
Kirstenbosch.
P/Bag x 7, Claremont 7735, South Africa
Tel +27 21 799 8712
Fax +27 762 0646
email: reynolds at nbict.nbi.ac.za
http://www.nbi.ac.za
http://www.plantzafrica.com