When you click the name of some company on TechCrunch blog, you are very likely* to be transported to some internal web page that it not the official website but aggregates all the posts ever published on TechCrunch about that start-up.
This practice of self-linking is also followed on other popular blogs like Mashable and Engadget with the hope of getting more page views.
Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog that everyone hates but still reads, always practiced excessive internal linking but good sense prevailed at Gawker and they have suddenly changed that habit.
Blog posts on Valleywag look clean and more readable than ever before and it’s now very easy to spot the phrase that links to the source of the story - no more looking at the status bar of the browser to find where a link leads to.
Thank you Owen Thomas, Nick Douglas and Nick Denton - hope other big blogs also draw some inspiration from you.
Read what some other thinking minds have to say on the "self linking"
Jeremy of Wall Street Journal calls this practice of internal linking as misleading , annoying and irritating - "If you are linking to anything other than what your reader would expect, then you’re just messing around with them."
Shane at Telegraph would just mouseover the link to see where it’s going and, if it’s a link further into your site, he would leave - "Isn’t it enough that I read you all the time? Must I really be sent on a magical mystery tour through your archives with every post?"
* According to Yuvi, if you are to randomly click any link on TechCrunch, there’s a 50% chance that you’ll end up on another page owned by TechCrunch.
Related: Funny Facebook Groups
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/a-lesson-from-valleywag-good-linking-etiquettes/1565/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Just look at the feed view of Valleywag, or even the source code, and you’ll notice the internal links (which are nothing more than spreading the internal PR juice - not traffic optimization) have’t disappeared at all.
But they aren’t visible in your browser anymore, are set not to be shown by the CSS anymore tho. But a hover over company names will still show the link. ;-)
I *despise* these kind of links and evertime I do land on such an internal page it really does add up to my frustration against this site and brand.
It may increase your page impressions but I found that once I ‘learned’ that a page does internal linking I stopped clicking at all or start paying more attention to actually not click at all.
Thankfully, the discussion about this topic was really short as in “this is a no brainer” for blognation - there is an added value to the company index and the information you do get from there (like linked articles and company info) but this is presented at the end of the article - where it belongs.
Maybe I’m missing something, as I don’t know how bad the situation is/was as Valleywag, but I don’t have a problem with judicious use of internal linking. I don’t do it much, but if I’ve previously written about something, then what is wrong with linking back to it?
Perhaps an icon or some CSS styling should be used to differentiate between internal and external links?
Internal linking purely for PR or SEO isn’t good, but genuinely adding value to an article isn’t wrong, is it?
Or, should relevant internal links be saved until the end of the article, in case people want to read more?
Or, should the link make it very clear that it’s an internal one, by the wording. For example [link]which we reviewed last month[/link] or [link]the Web 2.0 service we beta tested[/link]
I’m genuinely interested, though I’m sure no one size will fit all.
Ahh, sorry, I’ve read the context. D’oh!
No, I don’t like the practice of internal linking when it’s a company, service, or product name. In fact, I usually just put the external link right at the end of the article.
I hate when TC links to CrunchBase. That’s what tags are for — if you want to see other internal posts about a topic, click that.
Written by Skip on 10.20.07
I unsubscribed form mashable because of the internal links. drove me crazy. they’d use the name of a website, so you think the link takes you there, but no, it links right back to mashable. really misleading. hate sites that do that.
Written by jay on 10.20.07
It’s true that self linking may be irritating for some..but actually it provides more information on a topic.
Let’s take ur blog…i’m a regular reader of this for 7 months and I make sure I follow the internal links you post,just to know more.
So actually internal linking is good but they shouldn’t show u irrelevant pages which really is, messing up with ur reader!.
But today internet users are exposed enough that they would definitely look at the status bar to see where a link leads to!.