I’ve written before about the Black Hole SEO with Internal Linking for SEO win. Some of the largest media properties are getting more and more aggressive with automatic linking to internal tag pages or round-ups on a specific subject. Think about the New York Times or the popular technology blog Techcrunch not linking out to the actual website of the company the article is about, but just to the page aggregating all the information on the company.
Overall, I don’t think these Internal links ad sufficient value to the reader which would make me include these in my own projects I’m working on, (as my blog would only be that successful as the publications mentioned above here)! But this morning I just found one publications making use of internal links which are just plain bad for the user experience.
Reading the article mentioned on the Techmeme homepage, describing how Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress is spending time in his home city Houston, to get away from the crowded and tech fast pacing West- or East Coast, I couldn’t help myself asking the following question: What are all these links doing in the text.
There is a link on a number of peoples names or places from Matt’s past. If you would check where these links go to, you come to realize all these text links are linked to a search page on the Chron.com website, powered by Yahoo Search. Ugh, how bad can it be…
The article is quite entertaining to read, and clearly Matt has taken to work with the editor to get some quotes in and pose for the pictures. I just wonder if he has seen the end result with all the overdone Internal links in the article, even on his mothers name, with a clear goal for Chron.com to start ranking in the search engines on these names of people in Matt’s life.
Name the Internal Link Spam Algorithm change
After Panda and Penguin, can Google just release the next algorithm change which focusses on Internal Link spam? And a call out to all the journalists and editors, linking out to a company website you are writing a story about is not wrong, it’s the lifeline of the Internet, and more important; good for users! Don’t get caught in the crossfire of a next SEO trick going wrong, protect your rankings, dare to link out!
Now, what shall we name the next Google Dance which focusses on Internal Link Spam..? Some animal, black & white please..?
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