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5 Comments

  1. Myself
    4th December 2010 @ 4:35 pm

    I totally agree with you. But, the sad thing is, it’s not true.

    Not everybody knows how to follow a link. And it’s been shown that when using calls to action like “click here” people do actually follow the link much more.

    I guess the reason for this mess is that the “click here” thing has been abused too much for too long, so now many people do expect it to say “click here”. Also, given that links don’t always look like links (your links are not underlined) you don’t always really know whether you can actually click it, what will happen if you do, etc.

    I still follow and recommend these same principles, though.

  2. Ryan Swarts
    18th January 2011 @ 7:15 pm

    Agreed… My main gripe with it is what you point out first. The phrase causes the user to do so much more work than just reading a link and clicking. Who wants to read around a word to find out what a link is about? Not me.

  3. Bryan Garvin
    24th January 2011 @ 2:32 pm

    All though I agree with the idea, another option (for tight spaces) is to add a title tag to the link, so that on hover, you can get the full link text. Which is also good for SEO.

  4. @OptimiseOrDie
    15th March 2012 @ 1:27 am

    Strangely enough, been having this conversation on twitter today.

    I agree with your article but the odd thing I’ve found is that click here is one of the top buttons (from about 160 odd combinations of copy) we’ve tested in every country, in every test. It’s always in the top 3, and usually along with ‘Fix My Glass’ and ‘Get Started’ as part of a two part strapline and big call to action.

    Using click here is abhorrent to me in copy text and hyperlinks or where there is no context, no framing. But when you use it like ‘Start your download. [click here]’ where the ‘click here’ is a call to action button, it works very well.

    Nectar tested this in some detail, Lovehoney have done tests and at Belron, we’ve now got data on over 28 million tests showing that click here does indeed work in specific contexts.

  5. Dieti
    16th March 2012 @ 8:59 am

    Probably the general reason for keeping “click here” is that people are used to…

    It is funny if you google “click here”. The first result have nothing to do with clicking here…

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