Are media websites the worst culprits in (not) linking out? (#)

Old media websites - Misers linkers (Photo by vagamundos)

Traditional media have large online presence, with their official websites (referred to as old media websites). Such official websites tend to be an extension of their offline news reporting activities, and often have exclusive content and/or membership access. They are also monetized by blinking, obtrusive ads.

As with most other dedicated online news websites (think Yahoo News and Google), they provide partial feeds, spread each news article over multiple pages and generally try to keep you on their websites by providing little or no external links.

Such tactics of keeping the visitors on their websites often has the unfortunate side-effect of not linking to sources even when nettique suggests so. This may include news that was published elsewhere (and is later published on the culprit websites), referring to websites without linking to them (for example, in the news about Scoble Twitter breaking the news about Chinese earthquakes before news websites) or subjects of the article itself (when interviewing a webmaster or blogger). Critiques of such behaviour often point out that old media websites are doing so because of sticking to their old, outdated and ultimately failing business model.

When bloggers or webmasters are interviewed, a link to their website(s) can be a nice boost and targeted traffic for their websites. However, such links are almost never given, and hence those who seek the websites just search it on a search engine. A large number of readers will be lazy to search for the blogger’s website, and the blogger will often end up losing a vital part of the traffic because of the selfishness of old media websites.

This post originated when I was reading a post on BBC UK website, titled “(British) PM launching online question time“. I wanted to go to the YouTube page where readers would submit their questions, but the link was not given. I had to search on Google for the YouTube page. How lame is that (BBC not linking)?

Because of that, I nofollowed the link (above) to BBC UK’s website, for good measure. I had also reported PM’s online Q&A time on my other blog, TechZilo, without linking to BBC. If they cannot link to anyone, neither will I
If you are in a destructive mood, you can also install the Wikipedia Nofollow plugin, which finds and nofollows every link from your WordPress blog to Wikipedia. I would recommend this because

• Wikipedia is often found ranking higher than source websites for search terms on Google etc. For example, if you break the news that a new variation of a gadget (say, iPod) will be launched soon, and someone writes about that on the iPod page on Wikipedia, the Wikipedia page will usually rank higher than your article (which is the source).
• This happens because the Wikipedia article (which links to you as source) nofollows all links, even if the link is to credit a source. Going by my previously mentioned principle of not linking to anyone who explicitly blocks links, you can also nofollow links to Wikipedia with the plugin.

Have you witnessed or suffered as a result of such selfishness by news websites? What are your views on this - do you think that this is a necessary evil (gasp!), or that websites are being downright evil? Tell us in comments.

May 22nd, 2008