I am well aware that this is not a new discovery, however the extensive cross linking that some sites use annoys me. This came to mind today when I was reading a story that caught my eye on Gizmodo about a new phishing scam. I find that Gizmodo tends to give only superficial information so I tend to follow through to the originator story for more information. In this case I ended up at another Gawker Media site. This site then linked through to the originating BBC article.

Now the blog world runs on linking to other peoples articles that you find interesting, and the good blogs add value by offering either extra perspective or analysis, or linking an interesting story with complementary information from other sources. The social compact is that the linking article should offer this additional information and/or link through to the originating information in an obvious way. In this case the Gizmodo article offered almost identical information to the Jalopnik article, even given the different perspectives these two sites have.

Recently linking to other articles within your own blog has become slightly frowned upon, although I believe it no longer has an effect on the sites page rank so is declining in use. What is the effect of cross linking to different sites under the same ownership though? I would assume that the article on Gizmodo would have increased the page rank of the Jalopnik one. Is this any different from an in-site cross link though? Is this really any different than a pay-per-post arrangement?

I don’t think this is a practice we should ban, as there are times when it would be reasonable for these refferals to be used. Linking between different sites should have the same effect, to page rank etc, as linking within a site has. Google potentially alreayd takes that into account.