The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Battle brewing over deep linking
“We consider it unfair to base your business upon the works of others,” said Ebbe Dal, the group’s managing director.
There’s some new ballyhoo over the notion of “deep linking” or linking to an article that isn’t necessarily an approved mode of entry to a website. As an example, the link above would be a “deep link.”
So the newspaper publisher’s association thinks anyone who makes a living based on the works of others owes these “others” a payment. Well, what do newspapers do, other than write about the works, good, bad, or indifferent, of others? Simplistic, I’ll concede, but not altogether inaccurate.
This has a couple of very simple remedies. Any news organization that takes this attitude should be ignored by all search engines or indexing services. Once they realize how many of their visitors are coming to read their content discovered by others, perhaps they’ll wise up. If they were remotely clueful they would know that already.
It’s a trivial matter for a website operator to examine how a website visitor arrived at their site. So it would be simple to dynamically serve the content the user is actually looking for with whatever branding, advertising, whathaveyou the visitor avoids by not arriving through the site’s own entry pages.
When someone makes a request made from a webserver, the browser software passes along a lot of identifying information, like the type of browser, the last page visited, the network address, etc.
Click here for yours. The variable HTTP_REFERER is this page you’re reading now (yes, I know REFERER is misspelled: blame the boys at NCSA).
So a clueful website operator could examine these requests and serve content wrapped in whatever is appropriate for that user, depending on where they arrived through the website or from elsewhere.
The real beef is that users come to a site, read an article or two, and then leave. If they find no compelling reason to bookmark a site or otherwise remember it, it’s a lost opportunity. The online publishing game is struggling and rather than address the problem, it’s easier to make the boss think he’s losing money to search engines and indexers than because of outdated business models.