Valleywag and TechCrunch Changing Internal Linking Habits

Posted on October 20, 2007

We first complained about internal linking on a post in July. Blogs like Loose Wire have also complained about the practice. The good news is that it appears a couple of the bigger tech blogs may be changing the way they link.

Loose Wire points to this post from Digital Inspiration that says Valleywag has made some changes.

Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog that everyone hates but still reads, always practiced excessive internal linking but good sense prevailed at Gawker and they have suddenly changed that habit.

Blog posts on Valleywag look clean and more readable than ever before and it's now very easy to spot the phrase that links to the source of the story - no more looking at the status bar of the browser to find where a link leads to.

TechCrunch also appears to be changing its practice of internal linking. If you look at this entry by Michael Arrington about Flickr and Picnik you can see that he linked Picnik directly to Picnik's URL and he also included in parenthesis a profile link to Picnik's profile on the Crunchbase website.

They still have an internal link but now they also have the direct link which gives you an opportunity to get directly to the company's website as well as to the Crunchbase profile which contains information about the company and links to relevant TechCrunch posts.

It is good to see these leading tech blogs pointing their readers in the right direction.