Interweaving Link Code, Text and Words
It is very easy to override content on a Web page with links. Web users can have a hard time reading and differentiate between Web page elements with excessive number of links and with excessively long link text. Interface design principles such as Web user's prior knowledge and experience can play a big part in creating the correct combination of links and text.
In previous post, we did analysis on the number of hyperlinks and now we look at the length of the hyperlink, both the textual length and the word length. The hyperlink is closely associated with content optimization topics such as page noise and content visibility.
The data below, from a large sample of general Web sites and Web sites in favorable search engine positions, shows numbers on the length of code occupied by the link tag, text within links and words accordingly.
| Link Text and Code: General Web Sites | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| Link Text Length Average | 97.13 | 13.96 | 1.00 | 179.00 | 13.67 | 7.17 - 21.27 | |
| Meaningful Words in Links Average | 73.94 | 1.33 | 1.00 | 12.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 - 2.00 | |
| Link Text Length Total | 97.74 | 2,134.38 | 5.00 | 17,946.00 | 1,910.33 | 493.72 - 4,173.42 | |
| Link Word Count Total | 100.00 | 327.52 | 1.00 | 2,608.00 | 321.83 | 67.93 - 661.80 | |
| Link Code Length Total | 99.77 | 17,611.86 | 30.00 | 254,565.00 | 13,951.33 | 3,862.43 - 35,837.25 | |
| Link Text and Code: Web Sites in SE Positions | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| Link Text Length Average | 95.02 | 13.63 | 1.00 | 346.00 | 15.43 | 5.01 - 20.96 | |
| Meaningful Words in Links Average | 70.46 | 1.32 | 1.00 | 36.00 | 1.14 | 1.00 - 2.14 | |
| Link Text Length Total | 96.10 | 1,311.40 | 6.00 | 17,895.00 | 1,371.14 | 111.56 - 3,223.59 | |
| Link Word Count Total | 100.00 | 215.45 | 1.00 | 10,191.00 | 276.71 | 8.97 - 542.01 | |
| Link Code Length Total | 99.74 | 10,166.37 | 56.00 | 125,733.00 | 20,592.00 | 1,255.51 - 23,854.47 | |
The data shows there is not much difference on the average link text length and number of words, but there is significant difference in the overall length of link code length, link text length and number of words which is very visible looking at the eighty-percentile range that is much tighter for Web sites in favorable SE positions.
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