It seems to be sort of a slow news day, so I feel that it’s a great day to strike up a discussion.  I’ve been noticing a big trend lately while surfing my favorite websites around the blogosphere.   That trend is inter-linking, which is the practice of linking to other posts you’ve done, rather than linking out to other sites.   

For example, if I was going to inter-link, when mentioning Firefox I would link to my Firefox category rather than linking to Firefox’s official website where people can go to download the web browser.  I could also link to a post I’ve written about Firefox, etc.

So what is the deal with this?  There are a few positives and negatives of practicing this that stick out to me:

Positives – Linking to other articles has the added benefit of generating additional page views.  I’ve noticed many heavy traffic sites like Lifehacker adopting this process and adding as many links to their own works as possible.  In sticking with Lifehacker as an example, I’ve also noticed their top 10 lists tend to be broken into several pages, probably also to increase page views.  This is likely because they use advertising services that generate revenue based on impressions, rather than on clicks.  More page views mean more revenue.  Also, direct advertisers will often use page views as a benchmark for determining if they will advertise with you, or how much exactly they will pay. 

Negatives – Linking to other posts you’ve done rather than linking to company products or other good posts causes you to miss out on an opportunity to do some networking and engage other bloggers in conversations.  Why would others link to you if you keep everything internal of your site? 

Overall, there are definitely benefits to both methods.  If your site gets 50,000+ page views each month, you are probably ok to pursue more page views by linking to your other posts.  

For sites under 50,000 page views monthly, I don’t recommend getting overally wrapped up in cross referencing your blog’s posts.  If you spend to much time with yourself, noone else will notice you.  If page views is your goal, you can always use a variety of WordPress plugins, including Popularity Contest and the Related Posts plugins. 

Where do you stand in this debate and why?