Article in SEO

In recent days online, a new term has slowly been created. Though the terminology is new, this technique has been in use for some time: Link Bait. Link baiting is, in short, when a webmaster posts a story or other content that travels virally and is posted for the sole purpose of gaining backlinks and traffic. In the past several years, many webmasters have tried to stay away from manipulating the search engines or artificially building backlinks to their website. This is, in part, because that Google and the other major search engines have grown more specific and intelligent in filtering their search results, making it more easy for them to detect websites that are trying to beat the system. Some webmasters have even started to care less about search engine optimization and are now focusing more on viral, word of mouth marketing. This is done by creating something that people are willing to talk about, if not recommend the content to their friends and peers. Contest should be interesting, unusual, shocking, or sometimes even offensive. It has to be something that people will talk about with other people they know.

People have been posting offensive and interesting material on the web since its creation. However, posting such content becomes "link bait" when the sole purpose of posting that content is to create viral buzz about the content. You are, in essence, baiting visitors to link back to your content or page. This typically not only results in increased visitors by word of mouth, but also in increased backlinks.

Link baiting has been debated somewhat in the past months because some people are again abusing a legitimate marketing technique. Some people use the link baiting method to bring themselves visitors rapidly and backlinks, but they do it by posting false, deceptive, or otherwise questionable material to get links and traffic. Sometimes people will make up stories entirely, or sometimes they'll simply twist it, to imply something that isn't necessarily true.

On a side note, I think there’s a very real difference between posting something deceptive and something controversial. Controversy is good; deception is not.

To get long term success on the web, you very often must create true, quality content. This is accepted by most webmasters. If you create false or misleading information on purpose to gain links, this can hurt your reputation and the reputation of your website. Moreover, if you do it multiple times, visitors will begin to catch on, and your new link baiting technique will loose it's effect. Some more immediate consequences can be your users finding out the truth about the situation and correcting you on your own website! Such sites can typically be blogs or forums, but, as you can imagine, it won’t look good for you.

Link baiting, in my opinion, can be a legitimate method of gaining backlinks and some rapid traffic. However, I believe it's unethical to lie or deceive website visitors into posting links to your site for something that's either not true or that's deceptive. Your users won't link it, nor will you, in the long term.