What is the best Link Color

[pcun]

Is the best link color blue and does this have an effect on conversion.
The issue is that a new website had been designed and I am involved on the online marketing and advising the designer.

The designer is adamant that the link colour can be anything as long as it looks and feels like the same color as the rest of the graphics.

Industry standard I know is blue. Are there are strong feelinging one way or the other or any actual empirical evidence on which color is the best to use?

[St0n3y]

I've never tested myself buy I've read stats that say blue is the best because it is the "standard". I think that may be changing as people are getting more and more used to different link colors on sites but that's just a guess. One thing I would not mess with is underlining the link. Always keep that!

[lizcamps]

I agree with St0n3y that if you want people to click a text link, stick with the underlining convention. You have no idea how many times we've had to butt heads with designers who find underlines so repulsive that they could care less about usability for the end user. But all you have to do is look at the stats before and after, and it is very clear that underlining is called for if you want users to click more on your text.

But! There is a possible exception and I'd love others' opinions on this. What if you want to include lots of good link anchor text on a page without ruining the design by having too much underlining?

In that case we've advised clients to use 2 different style definitions - one for the links you *want* to see underlined (e.g. the headline of a homepage blurb that leads to a longer article on a drilldown page), and a second for links you *don't* want to be underlined (e.g. the keywords within the body of the same blurb, which will also link to the same longer article on drilldown). This way you can combine both usability (headlines get clicked more) and the SEO value of keyword-rich link anchor text (whether it's clicked or not).

I hope that was not too confusing. Maybe I could whip up a sample screenshot. Anybody else comment?

[St0n3y]

Well, I wouldn't do it that way. I know what you mean by making it ugly but I think you either need to link it or not. If you don't want the viewer to see the link they why do it?

Besides, there is nothing ugly about too many links on a page (http://www.emarketingperformance.com/:/962/link-building/a-completely-useless-link-bait-article/). :D

[pcun]

Right. Its all about usability and getting the visitor to click and blue underline is the best combination for that. I wonder do visitors care what color the link is as long as they find what they are looking for?

I know some people say that color has a part to play in conversion. The Eisenberg brothers mention it in one of their books.

Thanks for the input.

[St0n3y]

I know some people say that color has a part to play in conversion.

Right, and I think that point was that people still relate blue text with being a link. Which is why if you can go blue then do it.

[beu]

True, users may be conditioned to "click" blue as a link.

In terms of color psychology and marketing, if you want to make sales you may try red. Blue calms the mind but red is exciting and says "buy me now"! Red is also good because it prints as black.

[lizcamps]

Hi, I don't know how that last spammy post from eshoptrader got in there (moderator please remove it, otherwise I'm tempted to take a cigarette break right now and I'm not even a smoker; okay I'm a kinda-smoker :)

As for the color of the link text: In my opinion, yes of course default blue is ideal. But we've (at my company) seen that as long as there is underlining, the user learns quickly. In other words, if the links are obviously a sienna red for example, the first time a user sees the first sienna red link underlined, they realize the links on that site are sienna red. I'm not saying this is equivalent to default blue (maybe 5-10% dropoff?) but I am saying that users grok the color scheme fast, if the underlining is there

If no underlining, I can't help you, even if default blue and not underlined, there is a 50% dropoff in clicks to those links (in our experience)

By the way St0n3y, why do I suggest combining the non-underlined and underlined links as I described before... well, because link anchor text helps with SEO. So even though it doesn't help usability to have non-underlined link text, it does help SEO without taking away from the visitor's experience, and also it is not spam because it is a sincere best practice of getting justified SEO value without cluttering the user experience. Just my 2 cents!
Liz