Permission to Link to Another Website

Interesting and worth sorting out

[geekay]

Yesterday rfontaine asked here the above question, which is important. Maybe the original question should have been formulated in some other way, allowing an update of the long (6-page) thread on permission to link that we had here, on this very same forum on Webmaster World and started by Brett Tabke himself, in 2002 at:

[webmasterworld.com...]
and continued at:
forum12/362.htm

Now larryhatch wrote: "If ANY website asked me to remove a link, I would do just that, and immediately. My question, is why you would even ask?"

Tim Berners-Lee's golden principle was that you don't have to request permission to link to someone. How do webmasters act today, if asked to remove a link useful to their visitors? (For the record: I do know Brett's thread is on *deep* linking, but one can from it draw conclusions on linking in general.)

[edited by: martinibuster at 3:25 pm (utc) on Dec. 25, 2004]
[edit reason] Edited for TOS #24 [/edit]

[g1smd]

One type of link that can cause problems is when a site publishes a mailto: link as well as a http:// link to someones site (like "for more info see www.example.com or email [e-mail]"). The email address is harvested by spammers and the recipient can then receive hundreds of unwanted junk mailings per day.

This is even more annoying when the owner of the email address has protected their own email address using javascript on their own site, and used a mailform, etc.

It has taken a friend of mine nearly two years to get some sites to remove the unwanted mailto: link. Legal action had to be threatened, and a daily reminder sent again and again and again in order to make some people "get it".

Several months later and the amount of spam has now decreased by about 75% from the levels seen at the beginning of the year, but is still too high for comfort.

[geekay]

Silence.
Maybe requests to remove http links are never received. Is that so?

But if it ever would happen, how do you think you would react? Sure experienced webmasters must have some views on this subject?

[larryhatch]

Hi Geekay:

I have _never_ been asked to remove a link to any external site so I presume this is very rare.

EXCEPT, of course, for sites people fine offensive, off color etc. (spam / hate sites ..)

I DID ask one site to remove a link incoming to my site. In that odd case, I could
never get them to repair a dead link from before I got my own domain name.
I gave up asking and just asked them to take it down.
Down it went IMMEDIATELY, no questions asked.

IF somebody asked me to remove an outgoing link to their site, I would do likewise.
However, I would really really want to know why. There is nothing offensive on my site I can see.

If I may ask, have people been asking you to remove your outgoing links?
IF so, any clues why?

- Larry

[geekay]

Thank you, Larry, for your thoughts. No, I've never been asked to remove a link, but obviously someone asked rfontaine to remove one from his site. From his original post one gets the impression that he wanted to refuse the request and fight. He asked for legal opinion on his rights to keep the link, but asking for that was against forum rules.

I was thinking, maybe such remove requests is a new emerging trend on the web and if I ever would receive one, I should be prepared. I would regret having to remove an ordinary html link useful to my visitors.

The principle of freedom to link to whomever you want is as old as the WWW, so it could therefore be unfair if I were to ask for a removal. I had the impression that I hardly could force even an objectionable site to remove a link to my page. I've seen a hate site hotlink to a totally innocent image of mine, so I had to tighten up my .htaccess file. (Regrettably I was unable to exclude in the rewrite cond every search engine from having my images blocked on their cached pages as well. Google was easy to exclude.)

Individual blocking of html referrals from objectionable sites could be better than limiting the freedom to link. The link itself would remain on that site, though. But if there's something wrong in the link or its text it must be corrected.

[garyr_h]

I think it depends mainly how the link is placed.

Besides, even if you spoke bad about the others website before linking to it they couldn't do much. If they could, book reviews, movie reviews and all would never take place unless it's an actual good movie. You wouldn't ever hear that a certain movie is a D or F or two thumbs down...

Now if you stated that the website was yours.. that's a different story.

[edited by: martinibuster at 9:11 am (utc) on Jan. 2, 2005]
[edit reason] Please refrain from offering legal opinions. Thanks. [/edit]

[adamxcl]

I am a heavy deep linking person because it is most useful to the people who visit my site. Most of the things that I link to would be very difficult or time consuming for the user to dig around and find from a main page.

(Thanks for the link to the original post as well. A great one, with every single post contributing something in there. It shows how discussions have changed here on the WebmasterWorld in the last year or two.)

[Dynamoo]

There is, of course, no law about link per se. However, if the link recipient could show that in some way you were damaging their interests, then they would usually have a case for a lawsuit.

For example, if your site claims to be the "ultimate resource on Widgets", but actually each link goes through to an unrelated widget site, then the other site could conceivably claim that you were using *their* content for your *own* financial gain (I'm assuming your site has ads on etc). Such issues are difficult legally and depend on the exact circumstances in question. (Shetland Times v. Shetland News springs to mind).

You could also take into consideration the impact of Googlebombing, where potentially you can use the anchor text in the link to make a potentially damaging "statement" to users of Google.

Maybe a third legally contentious area would be the rise in external links into a site using redirects in order to confuse search engines and potentially steal traffic. If you're familiar with the problem, you can see that here is a type of link that often could have a provable negative impact on the recipient.

Ummm... so I guess these are extreme examples. But on simple linking there would generally be no damage that you could cause to the recipient fiscally or in any other way.