‘Roach Motel’ Links Threaten to Undermine Web Foundations
At its core, the web is little more than a collection of links — pages strung together by interwoven, linked text. For search engines like Google these links are vital in determining the most relevant results for your query.
But what happens when links start to become more self-referential? That’s the question posed by Tim O’Reilly, who sees an alarming trend: sites like the New York Times, BusinessWeek and TechCrunch are starting to link to their own writing about other sites, services and companies rather than to those outside sites directly.
O’Reilly is worried that this trend will lead to what he calls “roach motel” links — all internal links that do little to help the user and exist primarily for search engines. “When this trend spreads (and I say “when”, not “if”),” O’Reilly writes, “this will be a tax on the utility of the web.”
He goes on to say that if such links are “purely designed to capture additional clicks, they will be a degradation of the web’s fundamental currency, much like the black hat search engine pages that construct link farms out of search engine results.”
It is certainly annoying when you expect a link to, say, Google, to take you to the Google homepage and instead you find yourself on a Monkey_Bites post about Google. But, if history is any indicator, it seems that Google and other search engines, are pretty smart about these sorts of things — especially since the link text offers an immediate clue as to where the link “should” point.
While trying to capture as much link traffic as possible and routing it to your own site may seem like a good idea now, there’s no telling when a few tweaks to the algorithms will make it hurt, rather than help, your search engine ranking.
As for O’Reilly’s suggestions for those practicing these sort of “roach motel” linking schemes, they’re good advice, but for the most part, as a content creator, you know when links should point out — ignore your instincts at your own peril.
[Photo Credit: Piutus, Flickr.com]
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