Tim O’Reilly proposes the following rule:
Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.)
By my count, the page on which he proposes it contains 44 links to other O’Reilly pages, and 22 to the outside.
Now, if you examine that page, you may cry “foul”, because what I’m counting for the most part are automatically-generated links — O’Reilly boilerplate links, links to recent O’Reilly posts and comments, links to the URLs of commenters on the page, and so on. If we look only at the links he directly inserted into the body of his post, the ratio between internal and external links is one he’d surely regard as virtuous. Still, it illustrates that even O’Reilly uses a website design that emphatically conveys messages of the sort “If you’re interested in this, you may also be interested in these other things we have to say.”And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all.
