I often struggle with how to label links and I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve been guilty of using “click here” to identify a link more than once on Futurosity. But this piece, Why “Click here” is bad linking practice, by Jukka “Yucca” Korpela, nails it:
- “Click here” just looks stupid.
- “Click here” looks especially stupid when printed on paper.
- “Click here” is useless in a list of links or when in “links reading” mode, or whenever a link text is considered as isolated from its textual and visual context…
- “Click here” is bad food for search engines. If you say “For information on pneumonia, click here“, search engines won’t know that your document contains a link to a document about pneumonia…
- There’s usually a fairly simple way to do things better…
- “Click here” is device-dependent. There are several ways to follow a link, with or without a mouse…
Via Chris Glass
Yabbut. :)
The problem is that even supposedly web savvy people seem to have attention deficit syndrome.
I run a server uptime monitor service, which means practically everyone that gets there should know how to interact with a web page.
Unless you take them by the hand and point them at the “CLICK HERE” they have no clue as to what to do next.
I hate it too, it looks stupid, and it’s ungrammatical.
But what are we to do when the goal is conversions? Sigh.