Annoying Internal Linking Trend

Posted on July 12, 2007

For the past several months an annoying internal linking trend has been emerging on some of the top technology blogs. Some tech blogs are linking the name of a company to a special page on their blog or another blog in their network. TechCrunch has done it a number of occassions. For example, in this post about a company called Versionate TechCrunch links to a page on CrunchBase (one of the blogs in their network) instead of directly to the company's website.

The Valleywag and Mashbable blogs also engage in this type internal linking.

Doing this every once in a while might be okay but some of the tech blogs are doing this more and more frequently. It is much easier for readers when blogs link the name of a company to the actual company's website instead of to a special page on their blog or to a page of posts containing that tag. Tech blogs could provide both links -- one to the company's website and one to an internal page about the company -- but it seems wrong to force the reader to double click just to get to a company's website.