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Comment by cubicle67 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the original article http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...

Engadget does an amazingly bad job of linking the original article. You would think that the sentence 'Bloomberg Businessweek just published an amazingly thorough piece on Nokia' would have a link in it, but it doesn't.

No where on the page do they link to the start of the original story. The 'source' button links to the page/paragraph that the quote is from, but that isn't exactly the same as linking to the front of the other article.

The only links in the content go back to other Engadget stories. I'd say its bad etiquette.

After the article they have a link after the word 'source' that links to: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...

Engadget always has a source link at the bottom of the article. They don’t link to anything but themselves in the article text for SEO reasons. Also note that the word “Source” at the bottom of the article is not text but an image – also for SEO reasons. (I don’t, however, know what that’s supposed to help.)

This is a truly disgusting practice. The good thing about it is that once you know what’s going on, it’s relatively unproblematic. Whenever someone directs me to Engadget I know where I have to click. (In a funny twist, once you know where it is, finding the source is actually easier than when it is hiding in the article text.)

I will tell you how that practice might help for SEO purpose. A page has a limited link juice which gets distributed more or less equally to all links on the page. So if the article links to external page, some of that link juice flows to it. Why not rather limit it to your own internal pages?

If that's the case, why not just use rel="nofollow"?

@paraschopra: The practice in question was using image for the word "SOURCE".

This is absolutely a ridiculous practice. I cant recall any other tech blog who follows this. Even big time news publications like Nytimes etc, wont do this. I unsubscribed to their RSS feed, just for this one particular reason alone.

By default, journalists don't link to their sources----not if its a scientific journal, another newspaper, a blog, a tweet, or anything else.

They do tell you the source, but leave it as an exercise to the reader to find where it is.

So this isn't bad etiquette so far as the group they're conforming to is that of other journalists.

As a side note, the original article is a very interesting read that actually leaves me with a very good impression of Elop.

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