Blogonanism

Nick Brisbourne points to a post by Tim O'Reilly re the heinous practice of Self-Linking and notes that:

O’Reilly cites numerous examples, and Techcrunch is one of the guilty parties:

[Since] Techcrunch launched Crunchbase … rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them.

And he also sums up the dilemma nicely:

I understand the value of linking to other articles on your own site — everyone does it — but to do so exclusively is a small tear in the fabric of the web, a small tear that will grow much larger if it remains unchecked.

and

The web is a great example of a system that works because most sites create more value than they capture. Maybe the tragedy of the commons in its future can be averted.

I agree entirely. The web will be a much, much poorer place if sites only link to themselves.

Its an interesting one - we do self-link where appropriate (and we haven't gone blind yet) but clearly the big blogs are now trying to set up properties where they can permanently self link, because of the potential Ad revenue and user footprint data gained. The question is what would dtive these sites to stop - I don't see any force unless users found it a less pleasant experience than sites that do outlink.

For ourselves, I like Tim's thought that in any article, if 50% of the links are to yourself then that's (self) abusive.