I prefer the deep linking, but have found my good sponsors will have the appropriate links that work as your point is a good one, those links will work one day then give you shabby redirect the next. I think deep linking is good in mainstream and used often, but you do have to be careful.

I tend to use different links within’ a posting, I generally like to use the scene link on say keyword, then use the tour link where I may deem appropriate. I’ve also gotten into the habit of putting the ‘join page’ link in there somewhere, normally at the end. Another thing I’ve been doing recently is in lieu of linking to TGP, I put the thumbnails in the post and open the images with a pop-up type of gallery plug-in. I don’t think the photo galleries work as they used to, I am also liking the embedded videos within’ posts as well.

I’ve been trying deep linking for a while. But I didn’t see great results. It didn’t seem to help my MEN.com conversions. And My Gay Cash dumped some of their deep links to FHGs. I’m assuming if they had decent conversions they would have kept them.

But I’m discovering a couple of other reasons not to bother with them. When Buddy Profits bought the Pride Bucks sites, the dozens of deep links I had set up stopped working (as did the embedded videos, but that’s another issue). So now I have tons of links that say, “Click here to watch Jon and Mark in their preview” and the click just goes the homepage.

Thankfully I’ve used a jump script so changing all the deep linking is easy, but it leaves the call-to-action language a little messy.

These days the way sites move around and programs buy up sites, I’m almost thinking it’s just easier to use the main link and let the surfer hunt around the site, that might not be such a bad thing.