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Inline article links to tag pages on guardian.co.uk

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PorNaresh THAKUR

In yesterday's post, "5 ways that The Guardian puts external links onto web pages", I mentioned how Patrick Smith had sparked off a lot debate with a blog post entitled "Link to the past: why do some news sites STILL not link out in 2010?". In it, he suggested The Guardian website as being one of the best examples of linking out - an assertion he partially retracted, saying:

"On the subject of Guardian.co.uk and linking - it does do a good job directing readers to interesting and relevant things on its blogs and in the technology/media section, but I am swayed by some commenters below criticising my assertion that the site is 'good at linking', as the majority of links do appear to be internal-facing subject page links."

In our web CMS, we have a check-box that offers the option to 'Automate linking of keywords'. We have literally thousands of topic keywords, and the CMS will automatically insert a hyperlink to a tag page if the text in the body of an article matches the keyword. The automatic link occurs once on the first mention of the keyword, and we maintain a 'blacklist' of terms that don't get linked. The tool skips over any words that are already forming part of a hyperlink.

Whilst it certainly serves to increase the number of internal links pointing to those keyword resource pages, I think the benefits for the end user here are obvious in a lot of cases. If a journalist uses the phrase 'credit crunch' in an article, and it is automatically turned into a hyperlink to our credit crunch tag page, and that page opens with explainers on 'Credit crisis - how it began' and 'How the bubble burst', then that is a valuable and useful service to readers.

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