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“The website for Blockbuster Video” are the first five words of the article and the name is a hyperlink. Can you guess what it links to? That’s right! A list of

“The website for Blockbuster Video” are the first five words of the article and the name is a hyperlink. Can you guess what it links to? That’s right! A list of all articles uttering that name. They never link to the website that the entire article is about. Why are “news” sites allergic to linking to the stuff they’re talking about?

quenix 4y ago
> Why are “news” sites allergic to linking to the stuff they’re talking about? So that you stay on the site and read more articles, of course.
lockhouse 4y ago
Oh they’re happy to link to the stuff they’re talking about if they can use an affiliate link and earn money off those clicks.
basch 4y ago
comicbook.com has seemingly come out of nowhere and I’ve been seeing it a lot now. Without an ad blocker, the site is cancer. Is CBS on some kind of promotional kick / rejuvenation?
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  It links to Paramount+. So yeah it feels like some low-effort vertical.
dbg31415 4y ago
Relevant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Hmmm that’s actually a good point. Though most of me is still skeptical they’re just being nice.
hammock 4y ago
Why do you think? They have no subscription revenue and every click makes them money
thrdbndndn 4y ago
I also hate this pattern, but it seems to be pretty common. Usually all the links within the article are interlinks. External links, if any, would be provided at the bottom of the article. In this very case they didn't provide any to Blockbuster unfortunately, just a source link which is from Reddit.
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
Having worked on news sites in the past, this is probably an SEO trick. They have now planted a link, with anchor text, pointing to a page with a lot of content about Blockbuster Video. Often, the search engines are smart enough to detect this behavior and not rank it too highly. But in a lot of cases, this entity detection and link adding is automated, and so these sites can end up with hundreds of thousands of internal pages (one for any entity they've published articles about) and inevitably some of them will rank. And even if they don't, they've at least given the search engines a sort of hub and spoke pattern to crawl that topic on their site.
firstlink 4y ago
> Why are “news” sites allergic to linking to the stuff they’re talking about? So you don't cut them out of your information loop or worse attempt to validate whatever they're feeding you. There are news sources which cite primary sources, but few and far in between.
- corbulo 4y ago
  It's a really efficient way to validate intellectual integrity of a source. A source is only as good as its weakest subsource.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kristopolous 4y ago
Could there be limitations on some common editing software these sources use? I know how absurd that sounds but have you seen the thing screenwriters still use? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Draft_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Draft_(software)) it's like typewriter emulation mode for modern computing

quenix 4y ago

> Why are “news” sites allergic to linking to the stuff they’re talking about? So that you stay on the site and read more articles, of course.

lockhouse 4y ago

Oh they’re happy to link to the stuff they’re talking about if they can use an affiliate link and earn money off those clicks.

basch 4y ago

comicbook.com has seemingly come out of nowhere and I’ve been seeing it a lot now. Without an ad blocker, the site is cancer. Is CBS on some kind of promotional kick / rejuvenation?

Waterluvian 4y ago
It links to Paramount+. So yeah it feels like some low-effort vertical.

dbg31415 4y ago

Relevant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

Waterluvian 4y ago
Hmmm that’s actually a good point. Though most of me is still skeptical they’re just being nice.

hammock 4y ago

Why do you think? They have no subscription revenue and every click makes them money

thrdbndndn 4y ago

I also hate this pattern, but it seems to be pretty common. Usually all the links within the article are interlinks. External links, if any, would be provided at the bottom of the article. In this very case they didn't provide any to Blockbuster unfortunately, just a source link which is from Reddit.

Ozzie_osman 4y ago

Having worked on news sites in the past, this is probably an SEO trick. They have now planted a link, with anchor text, pointing to a page with a lot of content about Blockbuster Video. Often, the search engines are smart enough to detect this behavior and not rank it too highly. But in a lot of cases, this entity detection and link adding is automated, and so these sites can end up with hundreds of thousands of internal pages (one for any entity they've published articles about) and inevitably some of them will rank. And even if they don't, they've at least given the search engines a sort of hub and spoke pattern to crawl that topic on their site.

firstlink 4y ago

> Why are “news” sites allergic to linking to the stuff they’re talking about? So you don't cut them out of your information loop or worse attempt to validate whatever they're feeding you. There are news sources which cite primary sources, but few and far in between.

corbulo 4y ago
It's a really efficient way to validate intellectual integrity of a source. A source is only as good as its weakest subsource.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kristopolous 4y ago

Could there be limitations on some common editing software these sources use? I know how absurd that sounds but have you seen the thing screenwriters still use? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Draft_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Draft_(software)) it's like typewriter emulation mode for modern computing