Bloggers “double linking?”

Or like Techcrunch linking to the crunchbase-entry instead of the actual website they review. which starts to annoy me big time

Linking to yourself (frequently or all the time) is a bad idea because it lowers the credibility of your arguments. Using a wide range of sources means that there is plenty of things to back up what you’re saying. If you need to refer to a previous blog post then you just need to state things like the name of it and when you posted it. Then people can go through the blog’s archive if they actually want to check the source.

This would affect the quality of Technorati stats too (if you use that service).

I don’t think it’s entirely wrong or bad to link back to one of your previous posts. There’s certainly instances when it’s ok, and it increases readership of older posts.

However, I do get REALLY annoyed at certain sites that don’t link you to the story they’re writing about. It’s even worse, imo, when a site links you to search results of a keyword. For instance, if you’re writing about a particular gadget, link me to the manufacturer’s page on said gadget, don’t link me to the search results of all the posts YOU’VE written about that gadget. That’s annoying when every link in the post is just circular.

I find that I link to myself, perhaps more than I should. But often, I think, it’s because you’re establishing a narrative, a unique way of thinking, or a world view that is often best corroborated (or reinforced) by yourself. Also, you may–as I do–tend to get a little “esoteric” at times, but don’t want new readers to feel like they walked in halfway through the movie.

Not all “double linking” is bad. There is a whole world of difference between linking to yourself instead of a better source, or linking to a previous post, simply because you aready provided deeper review / analysis on a subject, and simply don’t want to repeat yourself.

Try to find a single Engadget post that has a link in the text that links anywhere but Engadget…that is self-linking taken to an extreme. Oh, yes, at the end of the post, they add the ‘Via xyz’ so that they can refer to a source. But I have never seen them link out to multiple sources from a post.

Apologies for the double-comment, but I forgot to mention that wrote about this back in 2006 – they’ve been at it for ages. Shame little blogs don’t get picked up more often

What *really* annoys me is when they link a word, so I click on it thinking it’s going to take me to a review of that product or something informative, so I know what it is. But nooo, they just take me to a list of all their posts tagged with that word, which frequently is infinitely less helpful than just not linking anywhere in the first place.

I think it’s OK if you’re making a reference to something you wrote previously that’s related, but CrunchBase drives me nuts.

While the practice as described by Louis Gray is clearly annoying, it is nothing unusual to have bloggers refer back to things they’ve written in the past. Anjo Anjewierden has developed a mechanism to visualize internal and external links that also looks really pretty (http://anjo.blogs.com/metis/2007/08/weblog-data-as-.html). I’d love to encourage him to figure out a way to do this on my own data.

In Engadget’s case, I’ve begun to wonder if their software does it automagically. Two-thirds of their self-links are links to tags, so is it possible those links are automatically added to the first instance of any use of a post that includes a word that happens to be a tag? The remaining links are actually useful (links to a specific previous post on a topic), although they hardly ever make any effort to provide contextual information via the keyword linked (a little bit of usability most bloggers ignore).

Techcrunch’s self-links, on the other hand, are to their directory of companies, and are clearly hand-coded. Lazy and useless.

Linking to your own posts should only be done when you reference the post, or if you have a “related items” plugin installed on wordpress or whatever. Other than that it is pretty unacceptable to make people have to click around to find the source of a news item.

Ryan Block of Engadget checks in with his own comments on backlinking. Good response.

At Gartner, I never referred to a Forrester report. The NY times rarely if every acknowldeges the Washington Post or WSJ. Ergo, any “link” in that world is 99.9% to itself…Us bloggers do much much better than that…no need to feel too guilty.

People click through because they want to learn more or are curious – if that need is met not sure why it matters if the source is the same blogger…

Mashable does it, Joystiq does it, practically, almost every group blog does it. Scoble’s share was relatively lower, atleast when I last statbotted him. Wonder how it’s goanna be now…