Label which links are duplicate / remove duplicate links about endthefud

[9mido]

Not all websites change the color of visited links though. Google search results seem to do this, but when I visit links on endthefud.org and a few other websites, the visited links do not always change colors when you return back.

Links appearing multiple times on the same page is not good for SEO. As a user who was going through links on endthefud.org, I found myself clicking on the same link again and got frustrated because I already read that article.

[pox]

@9mido looking at the articles in the output above, AFAICS they all appear with the same exactly link when they appear multiple times, which is fine (browser shows visited links in different color). Did I miss something?

[pox]

If visited links don't change colors then it's definitely a CSS problem. I'll get on it.

[9mido]

Ok the CSS is one thing for previously visited links but another CSS thing for coloring duplicate links. If coloring links, have a color key somewhere on the page that tells everybody that this colored link is a duplicate and this colored link is previously visited.

If you want more traffic to endthefud.org from search engine results, it would be best to get rid of duplicate links so that endthefud.org can rank higher on search engines.

I think the whole page should be better organized. Get rid of duplicate links. Show the link only once. But show all categories under that one and only link. Don't show the same link with different anchor tags either.

Maybe try something like this:

Link
Energy, Governments, Etc.

What you could add also is some sort of filtering mechanism for each category. For example, if I filter via a dropdown menu or checkbox by Energy then all links that have the Energy category will be returned. If you filter by Energy and Governments then only links with Energy and Governments combined will be returned.

[pox]

Ok the CSS is one thing for previously visited links but another CSS thing for coloring duplicate links. If coloring links, have a color key somewhere on the page that tells everybody that this colored link is a duplicate and this colored link is previously visited.

Once a link is visited, all its duplicates should appear as visited links in the page.

If you want more traffic to endthefud.org from search engine results, it would be best to get rid of duplicate links so that endthefud.org can rank higher on search engines.

Honestly I don't really care about SEO. The organization of the website is meant to help people easily find all the relevant articles by topic. I don't want people to need to scan a long list of articles of unrelated topics just to tease out articles for a specific one. That's why I think duplicate links are fine. If it hurts SEO so be it. I'm optimizing for this page to be used as a bookmark collection basically where the lookup is by topic, not by article, not by author, etc.

What you could add also is some sort of filtering mechanism for each category. For example, if I filter via a dropdown menu or checkbox by Energy then all links that have the Energy category will be returned. If you filter by Energy and Governments then only links with Energy and Governments combined will be returned.

There are some guys working on a twitter bot like this. Where you can mention the bot and one or more tags and you get relevant articles in a response. It's a nice concept. Doing it on a statically generated website like this isn't trivial, though. Probably requires some custom JS and I'm not sure if that jibes well with Github Pages to be honest. If someone can show me a proof-of-concept page that does this using Github Pages I'll be happy to consider adding tag filtering to endthefud.

[pox]

I've updated the CSS to show visited links in purple. This ameliorates the problem somewhat, although some links (especially those opening in Medium, I've noticed) still don't get colored properly on my mobile device. Maybe it's because they're opened by the Medium app instead of the browser itself... if someone knows how to fix this I'd be eager to learn.

[9mido]

What about putting something like an * or something like (duplicate) next to each duplicate link then to indicate that it is a duplicate? Or just color the duplicate links a different color than unique links?

The only thing I don't like about the CSS purple links is that once you visit endthefud.org again after you clicked a few of the links, those links are still purple and they do not reset themselves. So basically we are back to the original problem again of not knowing which links are duplicate. If you click all of the links on endthefud.org and return, there is no way of knowing which ones are duplicate. I think it would be better to reverse the purple CSS link change you made and label the duplicate links in a different way.