Deep Links

Deep linking, on the World Wide Web, is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a website, instead of that website’s main or home page. Such links are called deep links.

The technology behind the World Wide Web, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), does not actually make any distinction between deep links and any other links—all links are functionally equal. One of the designed purposes of the Web is to allow authors to link to any published document on another site. The possibility of so-called “deep” linking is therefore built into the Web technology of HTTP and URLs by default—while a site can attempt to restrict deep links, to do so requires extra effort. According to the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group, “any attempt to forbid the practice of deep linking is based on a misunderstanding of the technology, and threatens to undermine the functioning of the Web as a whole”. One way to prevent deep linking is to configure the web server to check the referring URL using a rewrite engine.

When to Avoid Deep Links

In a few cases, deep links are counter-productive because certain pages cannot or should not be used before users have passed through higher-level pages. If you have pages that can actually be reached after passing other pages, and you want it that way, back linking will be a problem on your site.

Prevent search engines from deep linking

It’s easy to prevent search engines from deep linking to a specific page. Simply include the following meta-tag code in the HEAD part of the page:

Well-behaved search engines will exclude any such page from their databases.

Deep linking is your friend: It gets users to their preferred destination as quickly as possible. Thus, you should only use the “noindex” meta-tag for pages that users should never visit first.