#Linking guidance for Azure technical content ##Guidelines for technical articles on azure.microsoft.com
| Link scenario | Guidance |
|---|---|
| Linking from an ACOM article to another ACOM article | Use relative links. Do not include the en-us language locale in your relative links. |
| Linking to an MSDN library topic, a TechNet library topic, or KB article | Use the actual link to the article or topic, but remove the en-us language locale from the link. |
| Linking from an ACOM article to any other web page | Use the direct link |
###Markdown syntax for ACOM relative links
To create an inline link from an ACOM technical article to another ACOM technical article, use this link format:
[link text](article-name.md)
[Create a Media Services account](media-services-create-account.md)
You do not have to create anchors anymore - they are automatically generated at publishing time for all H2 headings. The only thing you have to do is create links to the H2 sections:
[link](#the-text-of-the-H2-section-separated-by-hyphens)
[Create cache](#create-cache)
To link to an anchor in another article:
[link text](article-name.md#anchor-name)
[Configure your profile](media-services-create-account.md#configure-your-profile)
Since includes are located in another directory, you will need to use relative paths as below. For a link to a single article, use this format:
[link text](../articles/file-name.md)
If you have selectors embedded in an include, you would use this sort of linking:
> [AZURE.SELECTOR-LIST (Dropdown1 | Dropdown2 )]
- [(Text1 | Example1 )](../articles/example-azure-note.md)
- [(Text1 | Example2 )](../articles/example-azure-selector-list.md)
- [(Text2 | Example3 )](../articles/example-azure-selector-list2.md)
- [(Text2 | Example4 )](../articles/example-code.md)
To link to a page on ACOM (such as a pricing page, SLA page or anything else that is not a documentation article), use an absolute URL, but omit the locale. The goal here is that links work in GitHub and on the rendered site:
[link text](http://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/details/virtual-machines/)
To test your links, push your page to your fork and view it in the rendered view and publish to Sandbox. The cross links on the GitHub version of the page should work as long as the targets of the URLs are present in your fork.
Our [markdown template for technical articles](../markdown templates/markdown-template-for-new-articles.md/) shows an alternate way to create crosslinks in markdown so all the crosslinks are coded together at the end of the article, even while they display inline.
##Remember the Azure library chrome! If you want to link to an Azure library topic that lives under this node, remember to specify the Azure chrome in the link (/azure/). The Azure chrome shares the ACOM navigation options and displays only the Azure content of the MSDN library. A properly scoped link looks like this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dd163896.aspx
Otherwise, the page will be rendered in the standard MSDN view, with the entire MSDN tree displayed.
##FWLinks
Avoid FWLinks (our redirection system) in azure.microsoft.com content. They should be used only as a last resort when you need to create a link for a page whose URL you don't yet know. They are almost never actually needed. For ACOM, you define the file name, so you can know what it will be ahead of time. For a library topic that is not yet published, you can create a link that uses the topic GUID so that you don't have to use an FWLink.
If you must use an FWLink on a web page, include the P parameter to make it a permanent redirect:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=389595
When you paste the target URL into the FWLink tool, remember to remove the locale if your target link is ACOM, or the MSDN or TechNet library.
###Contributors' Guide Links