Link Policy

On showcaves.com, there are many links to sites that offer additional information or that have served as sources for us. In general, it is advantageous to have cross-references on a topic; this is, so to speak, the basic idea behind the World Wide Web and hypertext. Nevertheless, it has become necessary to establish certain basic rules in order to avoid negative effects.

Massive reduction of external Links: We have massively reduced linking to external websites. The reason is simple: external links are very difficult to check for accuracy and quickly break.
Links in the text: The practice of text links seems to have fallen out of favour, we guess because such links are hard to press on smartphones.
List of links at the bottom of each page: This was originally created as a kind of "references", similar to the bibliography at the end of every academic article. It originally listed the websites from which we collected information. Unfortunately, this is pointless, as websites vanish very quickly and the links then lead nowhere. We now limit the links to those that contain the most information and are also the most stable.
Newspapers: We no longer link to newspaper articles, as these often disappear quickly or suddenly become paywalled. That’s nonsense, nobody will buy a one-year subscription just to read a single article.
Copy protection or print protection: To create the link, we need the page heading as link text. We repeatedly find that some pages have disabled text selection and copying. In addition, printing the page is often prevented. Pages that offer information about tourist destinations free of charge and thus actually constitute advertising should not do this. If a potential visitor tries to print the page to take it with him on his trip, he will fail. It is questionable why freely accessible advertising should be worthy of protection.
Link exchange: We have already explained this several times, but here it is again: no, we are not interested in link exchange and do not encourage it. We also do not have so-called backlinks, i.e. links where you have to place a link as a favour, even though it does not fit the content at all. We do not want such links to our site and do not place them for other websites either.
Content restrictions: Many websites have a "external link policy" and prohibit links to malware, right-wing extremist or sexual content; the list is long and complicated. We do not need this because we only link to sites that offer information on underground attractions, geology or mining. So we have a so-called whitelist that contains everything we link to, instead of working with a blacklist that contains everything we don't link to. If a link does point to a porn site, it is usually because it has been abandoned and the porn site has bought the domain. However, this practice has become very popular with online casinos.
Deep Link instead of Surface Link: We very rarely link to the main website, and when we do, we link to a subpage with text content. We are more interested in the information than the institutions.