Posted by jonathanberger 10/23/2024
Having been on the Internet almost daily since the late 90's. I can say with some degree of certainty that the ambitiousness of 'click here' links on the Internet has more or less trained people to look for them.
In the authors example
Jcrew email receipt
For additional order details, please click here to go to your account.
For additional order details, go to your account.
Not only do I immediately understand 'click here' to go to my account, but 'click here' conveys that the link will deep link me directly to the referenced section or pertinent information that the sentence is discussing.
Alternately a 'your account' link, does not convey this message. It tells me I am going to a general account management interface, and will then need to browse around to find the information or section referenced by the sentence.
I believe 'click here' links have their place and convey the very specific message that they should deep link someone directly to the content referenced in the link and not just to a site that contains the referenced content somewhere on the page.
So, instead of
For additional order details, go to [your account].
use
For additional order details, [go to your account].
(The author does this inconsistently.)
And in this case:
To review or adjust your AutoPay settings, [click here].
You can review or adjust your [AutoPay settings] at any time.
they change the meaning of the sentence ever so slightly with the extraneous "at any time," showing that it is not always simple to remove the "click here."
Maybe in this case, it should be a button or a simple stand-alone link, like
[Review or adjust your AutoPay settings]
Covered in [The Whatever Times] was an article about something something,
I would disagree. Links are references to resources, not actions (assuming your link isn't a POST request).
Example:
For additional order details, go to [your Account page].
See also wikis.
People who headed that advice benefited from better human usability and improved "SEO" performance due to keyword relevance.
Web tools should have warnings about "click here" text in the same way they do syntax errors.
You were to instead make the link around relevant text.
(Also, early people often got hypertext just fine. The problem was print designers, who kept wanting to make the Web be glossy brochures. At first, they'd try things like making the whole page a GIF/JPEG, and would get laughed at, but they soon took over what a Web browser is, for the entire field. Over the decades, they'd then slowly rediscover ideas that were there from the beginning, and give them names like "responsive design" and "accessibility", and write books about them. On Monday, I had to battle with a Web site framework, to force something exotic called "server-side rendering", and also to make an `<a href=URL>` element be a hypertext link that the Web browser loads as a Web page when the user chooses to follow the link.)
In this case, the client is my 70ish dad and the people he interacts with for his project. Last thing I'm going to do is be like "no, it's not 1995, people don't need 'click here' this anymore."
People who write articles like this keep people like me in business.
- Make the link text match the exact text of the title or heading that you're referencing.
EX: For more information, see [Load balancing and scaling].
- Write a description of the destination page to use as the link text, capitalized as if it's part of the sentence.
EX: You can use Cloud Scheduler and Cloud Functions to manage [task scheduling on Compute Engine].
I've seen lots, lots of people living in 1995 these days then.
"Click here" screams "this is a link". It is not as obvious a call to click upon as a big shiny button, aching to be pressed, but it is more obvious than a few words that are in a harder-to-read color and underlined.
"You can go to _your_account_" is a much smoother sentence than "To change your account, click _here_". But is that always what you want? Do you want all your links to be smoothly integrated into the body text? Sometimes you do! Sometimes you don't.
Update the first example to something like:
For additional order details, go to your account by clicking here.
and `go to your account by clicking here` is the link.
> What will I see if I click a link labeled "click here"? I have no idea. Instead, choose link text that describes the destination.
Pretty much all of the examples are of the form of "To do action XYZ, click here". Why aren't you considering the "do action XYZ" part of the sentence?
> It confuses search engines
No, it doesn't. As he said previously, "this is not 1995" - search engines also take into account the context around links and images.
Most importantly, though, these are all just this guy's feelings. While I think A/B tests definitely have limitations, this type of small change is the kind of thing that can absolutely be probed scientifically (i.e. A/B tests, formal user studies, etc.) If you're in a company where people are strongly arguing one side or the other of this debate, I'd just use the famous quote by Jim Barksdale: "If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine."
It only leaves "It focuses on mechanics instead of content", though I guess the weight of that will depend on the context?
If we're talking about links that pweform actions, then the mechanics already outweigh the content.