Forum Moderators: not2easy
I have a site maintaining a vast collection of links which link to deep pages of other site not just their home page. I have two questions here:
1) If I add a link which points to a page of other site with a brief description of that page, do I need to ask for permission for such linking?
2) I want to create a cached page for every link on my site so that when a link is broken my users can still view the cached page. This is exactly what Google does. Doese googles infringe other's copyright? If not, can I do it?
Thank you in advance for your advice.
Newbies
Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!
Note that the name of this forum is "copywriting" and not "copyrighting".
1) No, you can link freely, except maybe in Germany, where a recent court case addressed deep-linking.
2) You could probably cache the pages IF you provide a mechanism for the other webmasters to opt-out, as Google does. This would mean using a unique user-agent string for you caching robot, including contact information and a link to a page which specifies how to block your robot and disable caching. Your caching method should comply with both the Robots Exclusion Standard and the <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> meta tag.
Frankly, I would not cache anyone else's pages, unless you have lawyers as good as Google's.
HTH,
Jim
Deep linking is still unresolved territory with differing case law over the place, and differing opinions - it seems obvious that it's not a "settled" debate.
For safety sake, before linking to any site, it's worth
(a) checking site's T&C to see what they say about linking policy;
(b) sending a courtesy email indicating that you plan to link, and to make their objectives known if they have any concerns;
At least if you do (b), then I've sometimes received a response telling me that that there's an alternative way to express the deep-link that will last longer.
Matthew.
