The road not yet taken on the Web.

The foundation of the Word Wide Web are the links. The only thing that connects all the websites together are links. Search engines, for example, mostly just take your search query and show you links that hopefully fit.

You may have noticed that the results of search engines can often be quite frustrating. They may recommend pages after pages of websites to you, which sound surprisingly similar and all miss the question you were searching an answer for. That is either human created, search optimized, and heavily copy-pasted. Or it is AI-generated mess.

If we would leverage links a bit more, we could make the web substantially more connected, enabling us to find websites with related context way easier and thus making us less dependent on frustrating search engines. And as a side-effect, it helps find the people to establish and strengthen communities.

For this I propose that websites should do what was already possible in 2007: link back. What if your favorite website A linked back to all the websites that link to website A?

Backlinks?

When you click on a link, your browser requests the resource (i.e. website) referred by that link. In this request to the website, your browser usually includes a link, from where you clicked on the link. So if you click on a link to website B from website A, website A is the referrer (technically misspelled as referer). The website knows where you are coming from.

Now you could automatically display the referer links on your webpages, which were referred to. There are various methods to achieve this, but this post is not about concrete implementation. In the following, we will focus on the positive implications wider usage of automatic back-linking would have, and I try to encourage you to discuss & experiment.

Backlinks connect us stronger

What do we refer to, what do we link to? We share links to videos, articles, blogs because we find them funny, informative, relatable. Even if you share media that irritates you or makes you enraged, it is still something that is interesting and related to you. Maybe it is this media and information that is closest to your heart.

Show me your links, and I will tell you who you are

If each of your links and its referred website correspond to a tiny part of your personality, then maybe all your links in sum reflect a larger part of you.

Today, you have to dig into your webserver logs or use analytics tools to see who links to your website, while visitors have no chance to see that. But backlinks make it at least more intuitive for website admins and further enable visitors to see that. If we link to each other with similar interests effortlessly with backlinks, then we can choose to also actively engage with others. We can reach out, if we provide contact information, and build & strengthen communities.

Even if we would not provide explicit contact information on our websites, we can just link (and click) to the websites we want to comment on. Your comment would show up there, because their webpage links to all pages that link to it (= it shows backlinks).

Backlinks explore and archive

Backlinks serve the visitor.

When you are on an interesting website with backlinks, it is so much easier to find more interesting websites. Even the more obscure ones. Just click the links!

I have a little self-experiment for you:

1. Try to find webpages which discuss backlinks like on this webpage here, which are not about SEO, by using the search engine of your choice. You are allowed to click on links on the webpages you find. Take 5min for this.
2. Now pretend that you have found this webpage: disenchanted.com. Starting at this webpage, take 5min again, to find websites discussing backlinks.

What was your experience like? Was the search engine helpful? Did the backlinks help you? How many fitting webpages did you find for each method?

Also, did you notice something different? The webpage I provided is archived, the original does not exist anymore. The backlinks are still helpful to find useful websites and preserve the traces so that we can understand the past better, making archives more effective by putting them in a more active role.

Backlinks shift power from oligopolies to web admins

Search engies have quite some power over the web, as we rely on them navigating it. What the search engines show us is what we know of the web. And we rely on the web for a lot of knowledge and communication. So the owners of search engines can censor and highlight, influencing us in daily life and long-term. On top of that, they sell our data.

So if we can surf the web more intuitively in a broader way and find quality information faster with backlinks, then search engines get less important and their power swindles. The power of a few gets distributed towards a lot of web admins.

Backlinks now: Starting with an experiment here!

Cool idea, you might think, but who uses it and what would it look like? I programmed a proof-of-concept blog, which has backlinks on every page. I could explain to you how it works, but lets forget the technical aspect for a second and use this website right here to test this concept together.

Of course backlinks unfold its big advantages when at least a bunch of people use it at the same time, but lets just see what happens. Maybe it inspires some of you to implement your own backlinks and we can experiment on what this old idea could bring today.

So spread the idea, link to this post, and explore who else participates in this via the backlinks below!