The sleazy practice of internal linking 19 Oct 2007

Jeremy Wagstaff bemoans sites that choose to link to themselves rather than out to external websites. Confused? Allow me to explain:

Take this article from TechCrunch, for example. It's a review of the first public beta version of Flock (a social browser built on the back of Firefox). If you click on the word "Flock" however, it doesn't take you to the Flock website as you'd expect. It takes you to a TechCrunch page about Flock instead.

This practice is extremely frustrating to users, as Wagstaff points out:

"I find this misleading, annoying and cynical on the part of the websites that do this. First off, time-honored tradition of the net would dictate a website name which is linked to something would be to the website itself. Secondly, clearly TechCrunch and its ilk are trying to keep eyeballs by forcing readers to go to another internal page, with all the ads, before finding the link itself. Thirdly, because I'm a PersonalBrain user and I like to drag links into my plex (that's what we PBers call it) it's a pain.

"Fourthly, it's clearly a policy that even TechCrunch has trouble enforcing. In [one article], the original post had the word Helium directly linking to the [Helium] website itself, but...was subsequently edited to link to the internal TechCrunch page."

TechCrunch aren't the only culprits of course. Many others - including Mashable and Engadget - are guilty of this behaviour too. Sadly this means that readers of these sites are forced to mouseover every link and check where it leads to in their browser's status bar, making the process of navigating ridiculously inefficient.

Updated: This just in. Valleywag has decided to abandon internal links. Well done guys!