An interesting piece by Tim O’Reilly over at O’Reilly Radar asks if linking to yourself is the future of the web:
At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.
This thought re-surfaced when Techcrunch launched Crunchbase. Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results).
I remember it was just a few months ago that I noticed that the New York Times was doing this to their own content – embedding links in stories that took you to their own search results – rather than to the website for the specific individual, corporation, or organization that they were referencing in the article.
Even some blogs do this – to Tim’s point – with TechCrunch being one of the first to do this on a widescale – but we have seen this within our own network with 901am having done this under its previous owner, and my own Telegraphik having taken this approach under its previous owner as well.
While I know I occasionally reference previous posts here at The Blog Herald because they add context and background to a story, we’re not currently using a database system to track companies such as TechCrunch or The Inquisitr so we don’t have content along those lines to link to.
What do you think? Should blogs link to themselves in such a way?
