Internal linking, ethical or not?

Most of the blogs these days use internal linking in their posts. Is this ethical or not? Some say it isn’t. It’s like having a house with an exit door that leads back inside the house. Well, it depends. Personally, i look where is a link pointing before i click it. But maybe that’s just me.

Why are people using internal links? Several reasons: too keep the readers on the same site longer, to allow the bots to crawl a site easier naturally, to point to other good stories on that site, etc. The first reasons is the strongest and the one raising the ethical question. Like o said , i take a look at a link before clicking it, but most of you don’t. So you might be mislead by the author of the blog using internal linking to click on a link that will lead you to something different than you were expecting.

Let’s take this example from this post on Engadget:

"looks like New Mexico’s the place to be for anyone looking to catch a glimpse of a possible future mission to the moon, with the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge set to get underway tomorrow at the Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo. As an added incentive for competitors,"

This is indeed an example of misleading use of internal linking, cause i was expecting to go to a page where i could find more about this Lunar Lander and not to a collection of posts about it.

So, back to the main question. Is internal linking ethical or not? Yes and no. It’s not where you’re pointing out to an article that is relevant for the anchor text (the title of the link will also help the user determine if that link is indeed what is he looking for), and it is when you’re pushing the limit.

That being said, i won’t stop using internal linking by no mean. I don’t see why i should do it. But I’m thinking about one think. Could be the internal linking a factor for which so many big blogs were penalised in the last days? I doubt it, but who knows…

PS: This post has no internal link in it.

Other people blogging about internal linking:

• TechCrunch has stopped internal linking
• Internal linking is out of control
• Internal linking is sleazy

Tags: internal linking, Link, misleading