louisgray comments on Engadget’s — and now Mashable’s — annoying policy of peppering their posts with links to posts and categories on their blog instead of relevant off site content.

But if you look at Engadget, a hyperlink you would expect to take you to Apple would instead either take you to a previous story about Apple, or to search results within Engadget on the term Apple.

The key to reading Engadget is to know that only the last link in a post is usually relevant to the post’s subject, and every other link is usually self-referencing spam.

TechCrunch has become an even worse offender. To visit a company profiled on the popular blog often requires two clicks. The first click takes you to the company’s CrunchBase entry, where you can actually click on the company’s link. In this example, 4 of 6 links are CrunchBase links. Stop the madness.

By the way, I officially propose we call this practice of self-linking “masterblinking”.