Welcome to module 5 – Links and Mentions. One key aspect of Notion is the ability to easily link and contextually pull in information across hundreds of pages. While the top-down structure and design of a Notion workspace do really matter, and we’ll talk about all that at length later on, the ability to easily and flexibly link pages and block together is definitely a huge part of what makes Notion so versatile.
Copy link to headingHow to Link Pages
There are multiple ways to link two pages together, but in the end, they all serve the same purpose – to easily jump to a different page in context.
We can, of course, always use Search to jump to any page in our Notion workspace, but linking lets us navigate the reader to a relevant separate page right from within any Page’s body.
Copy link to heading/Link
One way to link pages together is to use the /linktopage block. This is a standalone block that contains just a link to a Notion page – nothing else. You can spawn this block by typing /link, and then typing in the name of the page you want to link to. And – that’s it! There isn’t much more to this block.
[Link block GIF]
Copy link to heading@-mentions
This is something we’ll cover in great detail in the next lesson, since we can @-mention many more things than just a page, but another way to link to a page is to simply start with @, followed by the name of your page. This is great for inline links, since you can drop these @-mentions in almost all blocks that contain text.
[@mention GIF]
Copy link to headingPlus-mentions
Lastly, similarly to @-mentions, we can use the symbol “+” followed by a page title to link to a page inline. This a little hack that most Notion users don’t know. It’s very similar to the @-mention, but it will just display pages, whereas the @ way of linking, also shows you other things in the little pop up menu that shows up.
[plus mention GIF]
Copy link to headingBacklinks
Now, by default, page links are one-directional.** Meaning that once we link from Page A to Page B, that link will only appear on Page A, unless we also go into Page B and add a reciprocal link that links back to Page A. We can’t automatically create a pair of links.
That being said, there is a useful feature in Notion that kind of works around this: Backlinks.
Backlinks is a page section that we can enable on any page, and this section will show all pages that link to the current page we’re viewing. So, in our scenario, if we link Page A to Page B, Notion won’t automatically create a link from Page B to Page A in the body of Page B, but it will show that link in the Backlinks section of Page B.
By default, Backlinks will be displayed on any Notion page in a little pop-out menu. Just hover over the Page Title, and there should a little “X backlinks” (assuming that you linked to this page from any other page) text which you can click, and the menu will open.
Copy link to headingSummary
Linking pages in Notion is pretty straightforward – and that is it’s strength. We don’t have to manually find Page B, grab its link, then go back to Page A, and paste that link in manually. We can just use either of the three methods mentioned above to quickly pull in any relevant page. Now, as we proceed with this module, we’ll talk about @-mentions in greater detail.