O’Reilly on Incestual Linking

Tim O’Reilly has an interesting essay on something that is starting to happen more and more on the web — when media companies include links in a story, the links tend to go to internal rather than external content.

The example O’Reilly cites is of journalism professor Jay Rosen complaining about New York Times stories that had links in them, but the links just took him to New York Times searches rather than to external content. So, for example, if a story is about KPMG and the word KPMG is hyper-linked, I would expect it to go to KPMG’s site. Increasingly, however, the link goes to some internal “portal” page or search about KPMG.

There are a number of sites that I used to read all the time that I simply stopped doing so because they actively used this sort of linking to keep you at their site.

Now I don’t mind internal topics pages — in fact they can be very useful. But this is just like the difference between ads and editorial content. Companies need to clearly separate the two, or risk losing the user’s trust.

It’s just a gaming site, but WoWInsider.Com’s practice of doing this led me to simply stop reading the site. Every time I’d click on a link that appeared from the context that it would take me to an external site with additional information, it turned out it simply redirected me to an internal portal page which I had zero interest in reading. Moreover, I then had to actively hunt through the article to figure out where the links were that did actively go to any external sites. This was especially annoying since each story at WoWInsider had an area where the author linked to specific internal portal pages that he or she deemed relevant to the story itself.

After the 20th or so time that happened, I concluded that WoWInsider had little respect for its readers with such bizarre behavior and moved on. It’s not like it is the only provider of WoW-related news on the web.

O’Reilly outlines some ideas on how this system could be made helpful to users, but I’m skeptical,

When this trend spreads (and I say “when”, not “if”), this will be a tax on the utility of the web that must be counterbalanced by the utility of the intervening pages. If they are really good, with lots of useful, curated data that you wouldn’t easily find elsewhere, this may be an acceptable tax. In fact, they may even be beneficial, and a real way to increase the value of the site to its readers. If they are purely designed to capture additional clicks, they will be a degradation of the web’s fundamental currency, much like the black hat search engine pages that construct link farms out of search engine results.

I’d like to put out two guidelines for anyone adopting this “link to myself” strategy:

  1. Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.)
  2. Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide.

Except this is clearly nothing more than the latest version of the old trick of using Javascript to render the Back button useless. This is the result of some idiot executives sitting around thinking “this is the way we can squeeze more money out of our web offerings!” Making the portal pages more useful than the external links? Riiight.

One thought on “O’Reilly on Incestual Linking”

  1. Once upon a time I was a paid blogger (AHahahahah… hahaha… aaaaaaaah) and this was one of the “techniques” that the guy I contracted with wanted me to utilize on a regular basis. The crowning moment was the time where he wanted Blog A to link to an article on Blog B (which I also wrote for) and have Blog B, in that same article, link back Blog A. So that there would be nothing for the reader to conclude but that the two articles had been created at the exact same time for the purpose of pushing readers back and forth between the blogs.

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