Thoughts on using the same backlink multiple times in a single note?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/jdsbku/thoughts_on_using_the_same_backlink_multiple/

Say I’m writing about Oceania. If New Zealand is mentioned many times throughout the same note, am I better off backlinking it every time or just once per note? Does every [[New Zealand]] throw off the graph view or affect anything else negatively by being backlinked so much?
Curious if anyone has personal pros or cons related to this, thanks.

Not my post, but someone asked this question over on reddit. I’m curious what people here do about this. For myself, my behavior is pretty inconsistent and I usually stop backlinking the same term partway through a note when I get lazy.

I typically only backlinks once per paragraph and most, and sometimes once per note if it’s particularly long with a noun repeated many times (e.g. a country name).

@ipoopfool: as is often the case, it all depends what your objective is.

A priori creating a link is to show there is a connection between two notes (e.g. a link from note1 to note2), and if you want to see (leaving aside the popover) or edit note 2 you only need to click on the link. So far so good.

Now, if your note is fairly short and the visual distance between 2 instances of New Zealand is short, you don’t need a 2nd link because you already have one close by.

If, OTOH, you have a long note and the second time New Zealand is quite far from the first instance, you could link to New Zealand a second time, or a third, fourth, etc. time.

There are no hard rules about this, and there is no right or wrong way, there is only your way.

What I wrote here is not much different from what @icebear stated, I just thought I’d flesh it out a bit to give you some more ideas.

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Yes, I think that’s well stated. If forced to give a rule of thumb, I wouldn’t repeat a link when I can still see the first one on the same page. If it’s scrolled out of view due to the note length, maybe.

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Still another approach: :wink:

When I come across many same links one one page, I remove them and put them in the “Interesting Links” section which is part of my template.

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I follow the Wikipedia standard of “once per page, on the first occurrence” :slight_smile:

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