User talk:Megansmith18

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a mere directory of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam policy for further explanations. Since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, then please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Thank you.--John 19:20, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Hi Megan and thanks for your message. If you read the guideline I referred you to above it should explain what you were doing wrong. Let me know if you need any other help. --John 19:28, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

"Try to avoid linking to multiple pages from the same website; instead, try to find an appropriate linking page within the site." --John 19:49, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Good use of external links

You are very welcome indeed. An even better way to use external links in Wikipedia is if you can use them as references rather than as external links. Let me know if you need help with this. Incidentally, if you type ~~~~ on a talk page (like this one) it will produce your signature and a timestamp, like this. Best wishes, --John 20:27, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, that is a big subject. I've been here over a year and made tens of thousands of edits and I don't get it right all the time. Basically, if you want to include a website as a link, you should always consider what the relevance of the link is to people reading that Wikipedia article. It is almost always better to use it as a reference than add a link. For example, supposing one of the links you are adding says "Snakes eat frogs" it is more use to us to add that info to the article, then add the url to support the info you have added. There are various ways to format this but in the first instance you can just do it like this:

George W Bush has criticised Russia for "derailing" its promised democratic reforms.[1]

This actually allows us to improve the encyclopedia more than if we just added the link to a section at the end.

See WP:RS for a guideline on reliable sources. Let me know if you have any other questions. --John 20:36, 5 June 2007 (UTC)