I've seen several websites where there are pages that only contain a list of hyperlinks to useful resources for visitors.
I'm renovating a website that has one of those listing pages. I am curious about the usefulness of them.
Is there any use-case of such a listing page? And under what circumstances is the maintenance of a webpage solely containing hyperlinks useful?
I don't think there is a direct yes or no answer. If it provides a valuable resource for the site's visitors, then it should be there. If it serves no real purpose, scrap it.
For example:
Say a website about a new state bill and links to local politician websites is useful.
A website for a local restaurant providing links to his friends random local businesses, probably not very useful.
I personally find a (nearly) uncommented list of dozens of links completely useless.
Still, appropriate links in the right context are useful. But they should have some description of what awaits beyond the link.
For an eCommerce site I would not create a pure links page.
I personally like it when sites include useful links underneath the contact information on the contact us page. But that is just my personal opinion.
I myself am trying to come up with more creative ways of presenting these links. A plain old nav bar (or stacked links ) just isnt cutting it anymore. Take a look at what I am putting together on my new (still premature) site that I will be pushing in about a month or so.
I made the links a little more creative than I have in the past. If you are going to include the links, try to do something creative ( IMO ).
Good Luck my friend!
If you're selling stuff, I would say "no".
What value does it add for the customer? As a consumer, if I want to buy something I've seen online, I'm going to look for other places online that I can buy that item for a cheaper price. If you can be sure that you have the lowest price....maybe link to your competitors to make a point. But that seems like more trouble than it's worth.
As a consumer, I'm also interested in finding out if I can buy the item at a brick-and-mortar location if I need it immediately. If you're linking to those retailers (and it doesn't negatively impact your business, say if you're the sole manufacturer) then again it may be worth doing.
Last but not least, as a consumer I'm interested in what other people have to say about your product and/or your services. Linking to positive reviews again may be useful, but shrewd consumers are going to be skeptical of the reviews you link to and will also seek out reviews from neutral parties.
Now, if you're selling (for example) brass widgets with inlaid mother-of-pearl doohickeys, and plan on simply linking to:
...then in my opinion a links page is completely worthless.
Maybe you've got something entirely different in mind...but in considering all of the above, I'm having trouble justifying the (admittedly small) effort.
If there's content you feel that your customers (and prospective customers) should have access to, put it on your site. Make your site into the be-all, end-all site for your particular product by educating your visitors (note: education != sales pitch). The additional related content won't hurt your standing with search engines, either.
EDIT: pnichols, in a comment above you link to a travel site as an example. In such a case I think there might be a little more justification to build a links page, but still not a lot....because when your visitors leave your site (conceptually, even if the page is still loaded in a browser tab) they're more likely to run across a competitor site or simply forget about your site if they see something compelling or shiny. So I think my advice above still stands: make your site the be-all, end-all place for what you're trying to accomplish. For a travel site, that would be including a weather widget (so your visitors see how nice the climate at the destination is), photos of the location (maybe you use some Creative Commons/commercial-ok photos or hook up with a photographer on Flickr) and some internal textual content about what to do and see.
Sticky, sticky, sticky. Obviously you don't want to try and force users to stay (as I've seen with some incredibly annoying sites that prompt you to bookmark them if you try to close the window, for instance), but give them plenty of reason to want to stay due to rich, meaty content.
From an SEO standpoint, a plethora of external links can hurt your page rank in search engines. You should really only link to things that are very close to the subject domain of your website, and preferably link to sites that also link back. Basically, you should view hyperlinks as the Internet's currency. For every link you put up, it "costs" you some of that currency to do so, in much the same way as getting others to put your own link up can give you currency.
From a non-SEO standpoint, links are normally clutter unless they're actually useful. Put some metrics/analytics on your pages, and see what links are being clicked. If nobody's clicking them, then it's best to get rid of them. If a lot of people are clicking them, then it may be hurting your own business.
A page of links always reminds me of being online in the 90's.
I don't personally see a reason for a page that is a list of links on any website. Even a feature like a blog-roll is best kept to being an UI element.
An appropriate situation may be a list of affiliate companies on a business' website but even then I feel like it would be useless. Most users are not likely to click on a link without being given a good reason to do so. Especially since scams and abusive websites have become so prevalent.
There's nothing wrong with trying to provide a service to the public by providing a list of resources (with links) accompanied by concise descriptions. Scott Hanselman does it on his tools list page.
But just think about who this is benefiting before doing this yourself. It benefits the websites you're linking to, obviously. You might think it'll benefit yourself as well if you set up a link exchange. But... Google frowns on link exchanges. Their algorithm can easily detect when two sites are linked together. Their algorithm is of course top secret but it's safe to say that link exchanges these days are basically pointless from an SEO perspective.
If you're OK with that and you still want a resources page, just make it relevant to the user and provide good explanations for every link. This will do a couple things. First, it'll be a far more effective and useful page if you can relate to your audience. Second, Google actually creates site relevance not only by inbound links but by outbound links as well. So even though you'll be bleeding out some PageRank from this resources page, it's also going to put your site in a circle of related sites in Google's eyes.
As an example, if your site is about Ford Mustangs then linking to Ford.com could be a good thing for you. Another real world example is my site gldomain.com and how it links to OpenGL.org. Adding a link to the official OpenGL site seemed like a logical thing to do at the time seeing as how my site is all about OpenGL. But I think it's just one reason why my site ranks #1 for "OpenGL programs."