Should links be blue?

Why do you want to make your text bold and black?

You have posted here because you have doubts about this solution so why use it. The optimal solution is clear. There is a reason why millions of websites on the internet use different colours for their links. The standard way of doing things is much more natural for everyone and users will respond more because they recognise it easily.

I have to disagree with everyone suggesting to keep the same colour for links and bold. It will appear just link ordinary text which has been emphasized and until a user moves the mouse over the link they may never know. Underlining text links with a dashed line may work even if the text is not bold. It will even be better if it is a different colour

 

My website is based on a theme which has links as bold compared to the rest of the text. My idea was to change them as an A/B test to see if it would be more effective in getting users to see and hopefully click on my links. So, in order to make the best A/B test I wanted to get some ideas from the members here on DP which I could test. Currently my links have been changed to an orange color to match my theme while bold text is now simply bold/black. I also plan on testing the same color underlined, black underlined and finally blue with and without underline.

Thanks for all the feedback, comments and ideas! Hopefully it well help others who are wondering the same thing.

 

If you want more clicks on the links then making them stand out more is an obvious route - they don't have to be blue at all although it is a convention. Also btw, making the link over more words will also make people click on more. Bigger area to click.