Stop linking to yourself – it’s breaking the web

There is a trend which seems to be growing more and more prevalent on the web, and I have to say it is starting to really piss me off. I’m talking about the practice of blogs only linking to themselves throughout the post, instead of linking to external sites.

This heavy use of internal-linking increases page views across the site – which is probably why magazine-style’ blogs/sites such as TechCrunch, Engadget and Lifehacker do it, to help boost their advertising revenue. Robert Scoble does it, on the other hand, because (in his own words) “… that’s where the good stuff is.”.

What really annoys me about this is that you get ‘trapped’ in a site – you keep clicking through to different pages on the same site, going round in circles, when really what you are actually looking for is some links to external content.

This is at it’s most chronic when the writer wraps internal links around things like company names (or indeed names of people etc); I’m not sure about you, but I would expect a link around a company name to lead me off to that company’s website. That is the most logical and useful behaviour – I want to know more about that company, who they are etcetera, so take me to their site. The web is built off such cross linking. So why break that paradigm and instead link all instances of that company’s name to another page on the same site? Engadget does this as a matter of course, linking names to a page listing all the articles that they have written about the company in question. Nowhere do they ever link to the company’s site itself.

Apart from being annoying for people who are looking for a balanced, multi-sourced view on a topic, this practice is actually undermining perhaps THE most important feature of the web – hyperlinks within text that link not just documents but websites together. The joy (and power) of the web lies in the way it allows the user to meander from site to site, following an information breadcrumb trail with no real idea of where they will end up. Gross misuse of links, pushing all of the href’s internal, breaks this process, preventing the user from moving naturally from site to site, destroying one of the key things that make using the web such a rewarding process.

Obviously, there are exceptions, times where linking to something within the same site is appropriate – but doing it consistently, in places where it breaks the users expectation of where the link intuitively ’should’ go, is a mistake, and a bad one at that.

It’s breaking the web, and it’s really winding me up, so stop it. Now.