I wanted to take a minute to contemplate the amazing power of hyperlinks. Now I know what you’re thinking…not another blog post about how links can boost your rankings or drive traffic to your site! Do not fear though, I merely want to discuss the wonder of links as entities in themselves and what they can do.
Before hyperlinks, traveling to different destinations took ruddy ages. We walked, then we sailed, then we drove and most recently we have learnt to fly, but it still takes too long. Let’s say I want to find out the cost of getting a facelift at a cosmetic surgery in New York (hopefully I will not need to find this out for while yet). I would traditionally have had to get on a plane, fly the eight or so hours to NY, visit the surgery and then fly back again. Hyperlinks however can transport me to that surgery in a matter of milliseconds and let me navigate their site. I can then zip off to a comparable site in India to see just how cheaply I could have it done if I was a risk-taker.
Hyperlinks can literally allow you to circumnavigate the globe in the click of a mouse, which is something that would make even Ellen Macarthur’s eyes water! The Romans were master road builders and made theirs as straight as possible for maximum transport speed and efficiency. It’s a sound principle but then they didn’t have fiber optic technology which we have used to take transport to the next level by bending information-carrying light signals around corners and under oceans. I say “we” but in fact I had very little to do with this innovation
Never the less, as with everything, we now sadly take the hyperlink for granted and I just wanted to champion them for the amazing little things they are. Now… I’m to build some of them and get some roads coming into my sites that will hopefully carry some armies with them.
Nice read! I too like revelling in how something so simple can change everything (although a lot of that is thanks to Google and their usage of links in their algorithm).
Did you know that the link became 40 years old in December ’08?! ‘Twas a momentous day. Not quite legendary enough for a national/international holiday, but certainly enough for a blog post – http://www.aldissandmore.com/2008/12/09/today-is-the-40th-anniversary-of-the-first-node-in-the-network/
The analogy of links to roads is a good one and can be extended further. A town’s size and importance can be defined by how many roads lead to it and where they come from – a tiny farming village may only have one dirt track coming in from the nearest big town, but London’s got a ridiculously complex network of roads and motorways coming in and out of it from all directions and leading to and from all other major cities.
Similarly a site can only grow in its search engine strength on the basis of the growth of ‘roads’ leading to it, and particularly if that road connects from a big ‘town’!
Do hyperlinks also have half term time when for no reason at all there’s nothing else on the road? Do hyperlinks get clamped? And you’d still have to actually travel somewhere physically to get surgery done. But it’s true, the longest journey begins with a single click. It is better to travel than arrive and time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana.