Overlinking
Excess number of links on a webpage
title: "Overlinking" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["usability", "search-engine-optimization"] description: "Excess number of links on a webpage" topic_path: "general/usability" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlinking" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Excess number of links on a webpage ::
Overlinking in a webpage or other hyperlinked text is having too many hyperlinks (links).{{cite web |url=http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0%2C2542%2Ct%3Doverlinking%26i%3D48688%2C00.asp |title=PCMag.com Encyclopedia |publisher=PC Magazine |accessdate=2007-01-19 |archive-date=2012-06-14 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120614220146/http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0%2C2542%2Ct%3Doverlinking%26i%3D48688%2C00.asp |url-status=dead | author = Dvorak, John C. | title = Missing Links | publisher = PC Magazine | date = April 2002 | url = https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,33326,00.asp | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110806041207/https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,33326,00.asp | accessdate = | archive-date = 6 August 2011
Related concepts
The opposites of overlinking are "null linking" and "underlinking", which are phenomena in which hyperlinks are reduced to such a degree as to remove all pointers to a likely-needed context of an unusual term, in the text-area where the term occurs. This results in reader frustration. Underlinking results whenever a reader encounters an odd term in an article (perhaps not even for the first time) and wants to briefly browse more deeply at that point, but finds they cannot, but rather is required to conduct an extensive search far up near the beginning of the article, in order to locate the only instance of the word or term being linked— or perhaps even to find that it hasn't been linked at all.
Impact
Overlinking may deplete users' attention because it competes with all others, increasing the time of processing all possible choices, and adding extra load on users' working memory (cognitive overload).
References
References
- P. Thruesen, J. Čechák, B. Sezñec, R. Castaño and N. Kanhabua, "[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7840785 To link or not to link: Ranking hyperlinks in Wikipedia using collective attention]", 2016 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), Washington, DC, USA, 2016, P. 1709-1718.
- "The Same Link Twice on the Same Page: Do Duplicates Help or Hurt?".
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