Come on guys, give a little – don’t just take…

EDIT – my mistake, there are other links – to The Guardian pages on Gaza, the Internet & Twitter – and one link to the Israeli Twitter profile (but not with anchor text).

An article on Blinkx’s new ad system, which also sites Shell & MediaCom – the only links in the article? To landing pages for the words internet & advertising. Hmmmmm.

Thanks for the comment – for some reason Askimet thought that it was spam!

I’m of course not suggesting that The Guardian can’t link out, or that there’s anything wrong with creating landing pages to capture search traffic (I did much the same when I worked in publishing).

I guess my real problem is that when the links are from the body copy of the article, in many cases I’d expect them to be to external sources. IMO the links to the landing pages should be in the columns to the right of the articles or underneath them. But of course that might not have as much SEO benefit.

And I absolutely appreciate that there are lots of good examples of The Guardian linking out, but I’d just like to see even more. I guess I’m one of those people who’s never happy!

Cheers,

Ciarán

PS – Obviously I would encourage all of your journalists to link to this blog whenever they see fit!

glad you are still enjoying the guardian, and taking an active interest in our site

While I’m sure you’re not trying to tell us that we can’t link to our own pages, you can see that the links you mention all go to our keyword pages on specific topics, so if you’re interested in all our information on Blackburn Rovers or cricket, you can find it there. Of course we also have a policy of linking out, and none of our writers or subs have any regulations on where they can or can’t link to. Sticking to the sport theme, you can see good examples of that in this cricket blog or in our regular youtube roundup. This is particularly evident in our technology content, where the technological expertise of our contributors means our external linking is positively bountiful in its yuletide generosity.

anyway, I hope you can see that we try to link to as many worthwhile sources as possible, including of course our own.

cheers

Paul.