BWPC - External Links

Unlike my main website it is not my intention that many visitors find this site looking for something else. As such I don't need to shim the external links to other websites. My original intention was to provide a means by which I could access external sites without having research them again.

Never-the-less a rel="nofollow" property needs to be added to the URL.

The Shim

Looking at my main website where there are a large number of external links I can see how this could be quite frustrating and annoying for a visitor that is looking for a link to another website.

The Wikipedia links are a case in point. To discourage visitors from clicking on these links to disappear down a Rabbit Hole I developed the Wikipedia Shim. Here the external link is displayed in a dialog but it is not a hyperlink. There are ways of accessing the Wikipedia page without having to make a search, but that is for me to know and the visitor to work out!

Some non-shimmed links:

These contain the "nofollow".

• Francisco Partners - Owners of myheritage.com
• the Blackstone Group - the venture capital company that purchased ancestry.com