Mm, funny, but I’ve never liked visited links. Perhaps it’s a remnant of the days when all links were underlined and ugly blue then purple, but I’ve always found it weird to see a page change because I’ve navigated it.

Okay, I’m no designer or usability expert, but when would a user forget he’s been somewhere? If the writing’s good, the navigation clear, how on earth would I forget I’ve just visited your September archives? And what help is it to me that I notice Think Artificial is in a different colour? I know I visited Hrafn earlier today…

So yeah, not sure about this. In fact, when I do small html things, or instruct the real techies to make something for me, I always make sure there is an a:visited that is exactly the same as the regular link.

Or am I really shooting myself here?

I do think a fair bit of prejudice would come from those ‘ole days’ when I also remember the underline purple. I think this post by Jakob Nielsen gives more some more insight into why you should use visited links in a different colour.

It might make sense to have visited links in the body of the post, but it as Nils points out — it seems kind of weird to highlight visited archives or tags. And even then, unless we stick to the ancient but familiar underlined purple, the meaning of a “differently coloured link” is not apparent until the user visits enough of your site to catch on to your version of the link colour scheme.

But if you are doing the make lighter so show up less you are achieving the same response as they don’t show up so much visually compared to the normal link style. This is why my suggestion. Of course, in an ideal usability world we’d all use the same colour for our links but this just isn’t the case as even the default browser colours aren’t known across every user. What I suggest is making them less prominent as they have been used.