Nonetheless, my main take aways are that internal linking, when done prudently and to add value to a story, are great and acceptable. I am also going to do my best to start incorporating the [VIA source_link] as well. I already perform little screen grabs of some important element from a source site (something like their logo, or if they have a remarkable image for a given story) and make sure I am linking that back to the story as well.

I understand that you’re talking about the gist… but what’s a spelling mistake between friends?

I think you’re misunderstanding what people are upset about. Take, as an example, your story about Sandisk donating to the Alzheimers Association. You don’t even have to click on that link to know where it goes, because it describes itself.

In contrast, your story has a link on the word “Sandisk”. Given that it’s a story about Sandisk, and given that the link is on the word “Sandisk”, I’d assume that the link takes me to Sandisk’s website. Given your claim above that your internal links are to useful previous editorial, I’d expect it to link to a previous useful editorial. But, it does neither - it just links to all stories you’ve ever written tagged with Sandisk.

You’re not conforming to they way most people use links, and because of that, your site doesn’t do what I expect, and because of that, I have a poor user experience on your site.

You’re not conforming to your own claims about how your site behaves - if it did conform to your claims, that user experience would be marginally better than what actually happens.

This is why I don’t bother reading your site. Any interesting news you have gets reposted elsewhere, on sites that have links that do what I expect and don’t take me to useless index pages.

I don’t know when the “keyword” links started showing up, but started noticing them right before AOL took over. If you can’t at least point to something specific in the story, it seems kind of lazy to offer a catch all under the disguise of “background link.”

As an example, today Engadget linked to the term “Ice Cream” in a story. The link sends your readers to an Engadget search result for any story that has ever used the term ice cream. The 2nd link in the article to another specific Engadget ice cream story I get, but is the search results link really background for your smarter than average readers or is this really just smart SEO? I think it’s a distraction at the bare minimum.

I couldn’t find an archive of your 2003/04 content on the site, but if you look at the 04′ results on archive.org and count the self links, you can tell that they were there, but only to stories that added value. At initial glance it looks like in 04′, Engadget was putting in about one link back to their site on every other post.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040815005612/http://engadget.com/

Now, it’s at least two (or three) links per article and one of those links usually goes to a keyword search result, instead of to a specific piece of content that helps puts the story being discussed into perspective.

I don’t really care who you guys want to link to and you do publish so much content that it’s nice to be able to travel deeper and deeper into your commentary, but it’s kind of obnoxious when you click a link and there is no real payoff for the reader. If this helps pay for the content, than so be it, but I don’t think that you should cite precedence as a reason to avoid taking a more serious look at the practice.

Before linking to anything, the author should be at least taking the time to ask themselves if it adds to the story or not. If it doesn’t then why not leave it out or find a specific Engadget story that discusses the topic? Engadget has a lot of great content and linking back to it does help me to catch stuff that I’ve missed, but it’s the links that are choosen by an editor that provide real value, if I want to see search results, I’ve got computers that can help me find them.

Lack of outbound linking? Meh. Engadget is the best resource when it comes to most of these topics. I think I’d be more annoyed if I had to trudge through someone elses site when all I’m doing is investigating a secondary link.

My Engadget fandom doesn’t fade due to a definition of backlinks by any means, and I understand the “It’s an easy Google” comment. Your readers know apple.com and google.com and xbox.com for sure. But I don’t know if when they click on Apple or Google or Xbox within Engadget that they are looking for prior coverage. It’s also more of an issue with new companies who I haven’t heard of except through Engadget, where I will need to go to Google instead of right to their site from yours than it is with the aforementioned leaders.

I appreciate the discussion and hope to see more opinions and conversation. And… keep up the great work.