Preventing deep linking
There really is no reason to prevent links into your website other than to appease Compliance and Legal teams who are covering all options. Some sites have gone down due to high traffic loads when they have been listed on Boing Boing or Slashdot (not mine - not yet anyway) and that could be the reason why IT teams have got into flusters and the legal teams have tried to apply impossible T&Cs. I’m not talking content theft linking here - linking to images on your site or scraping content.
W3C recommendations for deep linking
According to the W3C Technical Architecture Group,
“any attempt to forbid the practice of deep linking is based on a misunderstanding of the technology, and threatens to undermine the functioning of the Web as a whole”.
That’s pretty serious - but no compliance/legal team is going to listen to that when their job is potentially on the line.
Couple of good resources that got me writing this short: The insane world of “No linking Policy” – what happened to the interNET? and from Sir Tim Links and Law: Myths
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