: Do website owners have a right to not allow linking their site from other sites? You can search for this phrase on Google/Bing 'Hypertext or other links to this website are prohibited without

@Gloria169

It allows them to issue cease-and-desist (or similar) letters to site owners/content-creators who link to their sites in a defamatory way.

I doubt Google/etc. have approached them all and gained consent to link to their pages, however the lack of no-index meta tags or robots would probably indicate implied consent for the search engines to do so as these are the standard technical ways to discourage linking.

There's no technical way to stop someone linking to a page, but you can do things to then handle the user differently depending on whether they came from a page on your site (via session cookies for example, or checking the referer) as opposed to an external source - think of pay-walls on newspaper sites.

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@Samaraweera270

This is done by websites who really don't have idea how the web works and why are them online.

That practice has no sense at all. It can't be enforced technically and I highly doubt it would be valid legally.

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