The Stonemason's False Front: On Propping Up a Facade with Links
In the mid-19th century, American towns along burgeoning railway lines practiced a peculiar form of civic optimism. To attract settlers and commerce, they would sometimes build elaborate, two-dimensional facades along their main streets. From the train’s perspective, the town appeared robust and prosperous—a thriving community of two-story banks, bustling shops, and elegant hotels. But if a passenger disembarked and walked behind these wooden fronts, they would find only empty lots, half-finished foundations, and the skeletal frames of a promise not yet kept. These were known as ‘false front’ towns, and in their architectural deceit, I see a direct parallel to a common but perilous practice in managing a website’s architecture: the use of links to prop up a structure that isn’t really there.
This is not the familiar sin of the broken link, which is a simple collapse, a door ripped from its hinges. The false front is more insidious. It is the creation of a network of internal links that gesture toward a grand, well-organized site structure, while the actual content—the rooms behind the facade—is hollow, duplicate, or of little substance. It’s the blog category page filled with thin, 200-word articles that all link to one another in an elaborate circle of self-reference. It’s the ‘Resources’ section where every link points to the same handful of pages, creating the illusion of depth without the supporting foundation. The links are the painted windows and ornate cornices of the digital streetscape, designed to be seen by the visiting crawler, not to provide shelter for a human visitor.
The motivation, then as now, is understandable. The town fathers wanted to project an image of success to secure a future. Similarly, a site manager might believe that a dense web of internal links will signal importance and relevance to search engines, hoping to bootstrap authority where none yet exists. But just as a potential setteller would quickly discover the town’s emptiness and move on, a user—or a sophisticated algorithm—soon perceives the lack of genuine utility. The links are not pathways to discovery; they are dead ends disguised as boulevards.
The corrective is not to tear down the facade, but to build the town behind it. The stonemason’s true craft lies not in the decorative frontispiece, but in the careful laying of a solid foundation, the raising of genuine walls, and the creation of functional, interconnected spaces. In our digital work, this means that internal linking should be an organic expression of a site’s actual, valuable structure. A link should be a corridor between two substantial rooms, not a painting of a door on a blank wall. It should serve the person who has already found their way inside, guiding them to more of the real, substantive content they seek.
The legacy of the false front towns is mostly one of ghost stories and historical curiosity. They were temporary gambits that either evolved into real towns or were abandoned. Our websites are not so ephemeral. The links we lay down are the permanent architecture of a space we invite others to inhabit. We must ask ourselves with every link we create: Am I building a corridor, or am I just painting a door? The integrity of the entire structure depends on the answer.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: