Tim O’ Reilly recently noted a “linking in” trend at websites like TechCrunch, BuinessWeek and New York Times, and wondered if linking to yourself is the future of the web –
When this trend spreads (and I say “when”, not “if”), this will be a tax on the utility of the web that must be counterbalanced by the utility of the intervening pages. If they are really good, with lots of useful, curated data that you wouldn’t easily find elsewhere, this may be an acceptable tax. In fact, they may even be beneficial, and a real way to increase the value of the site to its readers. If they are purely designed to capture additional clicks, they will be a degradation of the web’s fundamental currency, much like the black hat search engine pages that construct link farms out of search engine results.
I’d like to put out two guidelines for anyone adopting this “link to myself” strategy:
1. Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.)
2. Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide.
Even as the web moves to “linking in”, I’m “linking out” more than ever. I’m trying to promote good work done by my friends (Rajesh), highlighting stories in which they are featured (Ajay/ Ramya/ Melody/ Sakshi and Rajesh/ Dina/ Rajiv), responding to their e-mails (Saurabh) and comments (Harshil and Sumant) and saying “thank you” for their thoughtfulness (Jinal) by linking out to them. My hyper-linking is partly motivated by my need to stay in touch with my friends (even as I spend a year halfway across the world), but it is also partly motivated by my desire to bring back the culture of linking out into the Indian (business/ technology/ social media) blogosphere.
It’s a mixture of these two motivations that makes me want to restart The Best of Indian Business Blogs weekly digest, which I had started with Rajesh, Gautam, Palin, and Ranjan.
The basic idea was simple: we wanted to form a network of five to ten influential Indian business bloggers to promote link-worthy posts from other Indian business bloggers in the form of a weekly digest published on our respective blogs. The thinking was that the combined reach of our readerships would direct a few hundred visitors to the linked blogs every week. It worked well for a while until our busy schedules made it impossible for us to find time to compile the weekly digest. Given that all of us are even more busy now, it’s unlikely that it will work now.
However, even as I fight the temptation to start another new workstream, I’ll continue to link out as much as I can, and I’ll continue to hope that more Indian bloggers start actively linking out to other Indian bloggers.
great idea gaurav. I think this fills covers the niche that sepiamutiny and desipundit are too stretched to cover. looking fwwd to it!