I read a blog post by Tim O’Reilly. This was on the O’Reilly radar blog. The title of the blog entry was “Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web?” Tim is finding more and more that big sites are not lining out to other sites. If they need to reference other sites, their main articles will link to another page of theirs which lists other sites. This phenomenon is catching on quickly. Tim worries that this may spell doom for the web. The whole point of the Internet is for good web sites to be linked to by others.Now I can certainly understand why big sites do not want to link out to other sites. I run a bunch of very small sites. And I myself am very stingy is linking outside. When I do link, I frequently link to some of my other sites. Why give link juice to somebody else when I can pass it on to my own sites for benefit?
There are some small scenarios where I link out to another site. This happens when I find something truly excellent that deserves a link from me. And I have found that I get good karma when I do that. It might be that the owner of the site finds out and thanks me. Or even better I might get some links back from a site with better page rank than myself.
But the bottom line is that it costs me some juice when I link to somebody else. Why would I want to do that if my goal is to achieve a high page ranking? The only business reason might be that I provide good links that keep my readers coming back for more. I do not know whether that is enough of a reason. I figure I can write interesting enough stuff to gain peoples’ eyes.
Perhaps we came blame this problem on Google. They are the ones that set up the rules for page rank. If Google wanted me to freely link to other sites of worth, they would make it worth my while somehow. Google are you listening?
