| Link scenario | Guidance for the target link |
|---|---|
| Linking from an ACOM technical article to another ACOM technical article | Use relative links. |
| Linking to an ACOM page outside the documentation directory, to an MSDN library topic, a TechNet library topic, or to a KB article | Use the actual link to the article or topic. Remove the en-us language locale from the link. |
| Linking from an ACOM article to any other web page | Use the direct link |
The words you include in a link should be friendly - in other words, they should be normal English words or the title of the page you are linking to. Do not use "click here". It's bad for SEO and doesn't adequately describe the target.
Correct:
-
For more information, see the [contributor guide index](https://github.com/Azure/azure-content/blob/master/contributor-guide/contributor-guide-index.md). -
For more details, see the [SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL](https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ms173763.aspx) reference.
Incorrect:
-
For more details, see [https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ms173763.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ms173763.aspx). -
For more information, click [here](https://github.com/Azure/azure-content/blob/master/contributor-guide/contributor-guide-index.md).
To create an inline link from an ACOM technical article to another ACOM technical article, use this link format. If you create any new links to or from articles in the directories, you’ll need to follow the new linking syntax.
Old link syntax to link from one ACOM tech doc to another:
[link text](filename.md)
New link syntax
Article links from a subdirectory to an article in the root directory:
[link text](../article-name.md)
Article in the root directory links to an article in a service subdirectory:
[link text](./service-directory/article-name.md)
Article in a service subdirectory links to an article that is in another service subdirectory:
[link text](../service-directory/article-name.md)
Article in a directory links to another article in the same directory:
[link text](article-name.md)
You do not have to create anchors anymore - they are automatically generated at publishing time for all H2 headings. The only thing you have to do is create links to the H2 sections:
[link](#the-text-of-the-H2-section-separated-by-hyphens)
[Create cache](#create-cache)
To link to an anchor in another article in the same subdirectory:
[link text](article-name.md#anchor-name)
[Configure your profile](media-services-create-account.md#configure-your-profile)
To link to an anchor in another service subdirectory:
[link text](service-directory/article-name.md#anchor-name)
[Configure your profile](service-directory/media-services-create-account.md#configure-your-profile)
Since includes files are located in another directory, you will need to use relative paths as below. For a link to a single article from an includes file, use this format:
[link text](../articles/service-folder/article-name.md)
Learn more about how to use an includes file in the Custom markdown extensions guidelines.
If you have selectors embedded in an include, you would use this sort of linking:
> [AZURE.SELECTOR-LIST (Dropdown1 | Dropdown2 )]
- [(Text1 | Example1 )](../articles/service-folder/article-name1.md)
- [(Text1 | Example2 )](../articles/service-folder/article-name2.md)
- [(Text2 | Example3 )](../articles/service-folder/article-name3.md)
- [(Text2 | Example4 )](../articles/service-folder/article-name4.md)
To link to a page on ACOM (such as a pricing page, SLA page or anything else that is not a documentation article), use an absolute URL, but omit the locale. The goal here is that links work in GitHub and on the rendered site:
[link text](http://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/details/virtual-machines/)
To test your links, push your page to your fork and view it in the rendered view and publish to Sandbox. The cross links on the GitHub version of the page should work as long as the targets of the URLs are present in your fork.
Our [markdown template for technical articles](../markdown templates/markdown-template-for-new-articles.md/) shows an alternate way to create crosslinks in markdown so all the crosslinks are coded together at the end of the article, even while they display inline.
You can use reference style links to make your source content easier to read. The reference style links replace the inline link syntax with simplified syntax that allows you to move the long URLs to the end of the article. Here's Daring Fireball's example:
Inline text:
I get 10 times more traffic from [Google][1] than from [Yahoo][2] or [MSN][3].
Link references at the end of the article:
<!--Reference links in article-->
[1]: http://google.com/
[2]: http://search.yahoo.com/
[3]: http://search.msn.com/
Make sure you include the space after the colon, before the link. When you link to other technical articles, if you forget to include the space, the link will be broken in the published article.
If you want to link to an Azure library topic that lives under this node, remember to specify the Azure chrome in the link (/azure/). The Azure chrome shares the ACOM navigation options and displays only the Azure content of the MSDN library. A properly scoped link looks like this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dd163896.aspx
Otherwise, the page will be rendered in the standard MSDN view, with the entire MSDN tree displayed.
Avoid FWLinks (our redirection system) in azure.microsoft.com content. They should be used only as a last resort when you need to create a link for a page whose URL you don't yet know. They are almost never actually needed. For ACOM, you define the file name, so you can know what it will be ahead of time. For a library topic that is not yet published, you can create a link that uses the topic GUID so that you don't have to use an FWLink.
If you must use an FWLink on a web page, include the P parameter to make it a permanent redirect:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=389595
When you paste the target URL into the FWLink tool, remember to remove the locale if your target link is ACOM, or the MSDN or TechNet library.