I've been reading blogs for quite a while now, they are after all the newspaper of the Internet; if you don't read them you fall behind and running a website becomes pointless (and what do you have to geek out on!?). Though there's one thing that really bugs me.

Interlinking.

It annoys me when blogs constantly link to themselves. When it's helpful, obviously it doesn't bother me. Like when they link to a post they wrote about Feedburner's merger with Google when the author wants to mention that. The type of interlinking that bugs me is when the author links the word "Playstation 3" to a review of an obscure game that they reviewed on their blog a few weeks back. It's the first kind that is actually useful.

It's useful not only to the user, but to the blogger as well. There a few reasons behind interlinking. First, it ups that page's PR, not as much as an organic link from another site does, but it still does. One of my projects got PR 4 from just interlinking.

Another reason is that people reading from an RSS reader are more likely to head over to the site if you link to another page on it. RSS feeds are great for the readers since they can get all the content they want all in one space, but for publishers it means that users never have to go to their website and so they don't get so many page views which causes their advertising revenue to drop. So, by interlinking you'll get more people to see your actual pages (and adverts!).

A reason that I don't like; it gets people to stay on their site, rather than go to another. Chances are that if you link out of your site then the person won't come back unless they're really interested and have a good attention span (which tests say most people online don't).

So, you should interlink sensibly, in order not to annoy your readers. If you're linking to information then it's fine to link to that information on your site if you have it, but don't link to your site if that information really won't help the user.