It seems the more major bloggers tend to ask for the same rights, privileges and respect given traditional journalists, the more frequently I'm seeing some of them violate best practices for information sharing and news gathering. One major issue I see is that some of the most popular blogs, including Engadget and Mashable, prefer to lead readers deep into their archives rather than linking out to the true sources of the story.What do I mean by this exactly?
In real-world journalism, a reporter impartially offers up the news, as well as balanced commentary from individuals involved, whether they be the subject of a story, witness, or interested party. All efforts are taken to introduce the reader to the source of the information. On the Web, a story on Apple's iPod would link to the Apple Web site or directly to the iPod page. But if you look at Engadget, a hyperlink you would expect to take you to Apple would instead either take you to a previous story about Apple, or to search results within Engadget on the term Apple.
And now it seems Mashable, one leading Web log which follows the hot tech news of the day, is taking the same approach, much to the detriment of readers - many of whom likely find themselves clicking first, and asking questions later.
For example, from tonight's story: "Obama On LinkedIn"
The reporter writes:
"Sen. Barack Obama now has a LinkedIn account. We all knew that Obama is making the most of Internet culture, launching his own social network, gaining a larger-than-life presence on MySpace, YouTube, and even Twitter. He’s at the top of his game, according to a recent Nielsen study. The only surprise about Obama’s LinkedIn account is how seemingly late it is."
Being a typical reader, I would expect the three links in this paragraph, to LinkedIn, Twitter and Nielsen, to take me to those services' respective sites, as my links do. But they don't. Instead, the links go to related prior stories from Mashable, in an effort to keep the reader locked into the site as long as possible, either to increase ad revenue, or to possibly make the reader think the site more valuable due its deep archives and previous history.
In June of this year, Yuvi Panda analyzed Engadget and found that more than 40% of all links from Engadget were back to itself, "about 25 times the number of links of it’s closest competitor (which incidentally happens to be EngadgetMobile, an offshoot of Engadget)." Engadget, an unquestioned leader in gadget and tech news, should feel confident enough to send readers off site and expect them to come back.
When I link internally, I introduce the link as a previous post, and when I link to Engadget, you'll know the link goes to Engadget, not a previous story I wrote on Engadget. I believe the practice of hotlinking keywords instead to internal stories is sneaky and doesn't serve readers who are looking for the true sources of information. I hope we see the practice's growth stop cold.
Update: Robert Scoble calls the practice "double linking", while Joe of SurfLizard proposes a new term for this practice: "masterblinking".
29 comments:
Of course, needless back-linking should be avoided as it distracts the reader.
I do have to agree with badsra, though, it's pretty easy to simply roll over the link and check where the link goes. That's been an action I've taken for a long time, and I don't think there's been a negative effect as yet!
but still, james d kirk have a point too, recently i've been doing the same, because of some SEO or something like that, that suggests deep-linking within your blog itself :|
my opinion is that for deep-linking they should choose the keyword wisely, like you said just so it's not misleading, since if you're a loyal reader, of course you always follows their posts, so no need to link back again so aggresive.
I agree with you Louis that this is a sneaky method being used by a growing number of main tech blogs as a way to further increase advertising page views.
Personally I would go further and say that it is borderline dishonest and IMO blogs that are doing this should be boycotted until they behave more responsibly to their readers than their pocketbooks.
I was considering linking to TechCrunch in my next post but I think I'll link Scoble instead.
However, I prefer internal linking over the practice most profesional journalists have on main stream media: not linking at all!
But I take the point about linking to the thing you are referencing, rather than a piece you wrote about the thing you are referencing.
Thanks for dropping by at fasterfuture by the way louis. You're always welcome. dc
We are not trying to trick users into going places they don't expect to go just to barrage them with more ads.
We do realize that many readers find this linking behavior undesirable, so we are actively looking into ways we can refer to both corporate websites and CrunchBase pages from the main blog.
Please email me if you have any particularly good ideas as to how we ought to do this.
Engadget may be better at it, but the price for most annoying definitively goes to Valleywag, simply because they're using hidden links together with and in addition to the normal internal in-article linking...
There's a touch of ego too: you want credit for being early, for covering this beat, and for people to read relevant items you're proud of writing before.
Misleading links are always bad form, though. We'll have to do better.
Looks like I'm late to this conversation.
Yeah, internal links are a tricky one. They're useful if you link to reference material, which is why we started doing it in the first place. In the case you cite, however, they're a pain in the ass: that LinkedIn one is a classic example of where they should definitely *not* be used. We have a verbal policy that the first link should go to the site in question, so that one is human error.
I can guarantee that we'll try to avoid the LinkedIn type screnarios. As for linking to reference material...possibly we'll find a way to offer the user a choice. I'll look into that.
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...
i.e. if you know your readers are smart enough to figure out how to go to Apple's site on their own, don't waste their time -- give them a link to a richer dataset instead.
More here: http://blog.yuvisense.net/2007/10/11/statbot-techcrunch-data-analysis/