New Linking Features

The New York Times added new linking features to its site that allow “power users” to highlight and get the URL to specific paragraphs. Here’s how it works:

* If you wanted to link to a specific paragraph, you’d simply add a “#” and the number of the paragraph, e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#p2
* You can even go a step deeper and skip to a particular sentence, e.g.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#p2s2 Update 12/2: while you can *highlight* particular sentences, you can’t specifically link to them, according to the NYT system’s developer, Michael Donohue.
* And here’s where it really gets cool, though. If you want to highlight that section, you simply switch the p to an h. I generated the highlighted text below with the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#h2s2
* To simplify things, if you hit your shift key twice on a Times story, small icons appear next to every paragraph. Click on one of them and it’ll place the paragraph linked URL up in the address bar of your browser.

Could this be right for your content? Typically, if you have content that users site as a source, such as: research; news; events or otherwise, this type of coding would be great. I’m still curious to see how this will effect search as a whole.

This “Power User” says Neeto!

*Source