Linkbait is the New Reciprocal Links Page

As long as you do linkbait for the right reasons (ie to build attention to your brand) I can't see the problem with it.

Of course meaningless links from low value blogs deserve to be devalued but real linkbait is about figuring how to get a link from major news sites and the leaders in your niche.

Creating a resource so useful that everybody links to it and Google is proud to rank at the top of their results is just a win win situation.

as far as my experience says people who indulge in linkbait for there product/website end up as failures. It is always the people who follow the right path end up on top in SERPs.

I would love to get link from SEOBook, from problogger but I won't (and I do not know how) to use blackhat method to get that. So I will have to follow "Content is the King" path to you!

Links which have weight cannot be earned by dirty linkbait methods and links which can be earned by those dirty methods will have no value..!

@Compuworld you seem to be associating linkbait with "dirty" seo methods.

What if I wrote a really great article about internet marketing and ProBlogger and SEOBook decided it was so good they wanted to link to it? That would be linkbait but it's not dirty, it's just good content.

Linkbait is just good marketing with a little bit of attention spent on figuring out how to maximise the number of links gained in the process. For example you release a great article about SEO but add something controversial in it so lots of bloggers drop you a link just to disagree.

Some people might say this article was linkbait, if it wasn't a Saturday I'd probably have blogged about it.

The linkbait I was referencing in this post was the off topic type stuff. Patrick I can email you a link to a linkbait that got thousands of links from sites like Life Hacker and Wired and is graybar and PageRank 0 in Google.

That might refocus the trust of engineer intent when they tell people how wonderful linkbait is.

Aaron,glad you are always there.I bet you had a great wedding.Bless you

Aaron,

It sounds like you are writing about my SES puppet movie in which starred in. :)

I have other more consistent link strategies in place, the first video I did was to only get authority links to add to my "link signature". An example of this is I could never out rank this professor from England for my name "Dave Dugdale", but after that 1st video I finally became #1 because of the off-topic but authoritative links from the SEO crowd. The second video is not going after authority links, it is going after relevant links in the real estate industry because the real estate bloggers are picking up the story.

I guess in a way I failed in my link bait because I put you in the show and you didn't link to me. Oh well, I had a lot of fun making it.

@Patrick: as Aaron says in the comment after yours "The linkbait I was referencing in this post was the off topic type stuff. Patrick I can email you a link to a linkbait that got thousands of links from sites like Life Hacker and Wired and is graybar and PageRank 0 in Google." it seems that if I relate linkbait with dirty seo method than I am right (atleast to an extent)

I understand that I might have misunderstood linkbait but I guess Aaron strengthened my point :)

Hey Aaron;

Yet another great post, and many thanks for the link. I hope that post can help a few people out.

I have recently wrapped up a huge linkbaiting campaign for one of my income sites that was a great success, and so far has gone under the radar - we're currently in the middle moving to another strategy to avoid any footprints, and to keep things fresh. Thanks for all your invaluable tips.

Hey Aaron;

Just checked my trackbacks... Someone likes the way you write.

So basically we have to distinguish between two types of link bait:

the off-topic attention-whore type of link bait will not help much anymore, because people are only linking to it during a short period of time. And then it stops.

Whereas on-topic link bait (really useful+unique content) will usually not show as big of a spike in link growth, plus it will continue to get links for a long period of time.

Is that the difference?

Thus investing your time into creating link bait that gets links b/c it's truly useful is still the way to go.

But link bait that only attracts links b/c it attracts attention will not help much anymore?

OR...does a devaluation of (off-topic) link bait attempts also have an effect on "useful/on-topic" link bait as the engines can't necessarily distinguish between the two?

Is the assumption I made above correct? off-topic link bait = higher link growth over a short period of time vs. on-topic link bait = smaller link growth, but over a longer period of time? (It seems to me as if those two types of attracting links can overlap in some cases)

Im a bit lost..thanks!

Hi Patrick
I am not sure if it is just how topically relevant it is that matters, but more if you can keep up the pace of link growth going forward.

My point was that the great stuff keeps building links even after it is launched, whereas the attention whoring stuff does not have that longterm effect.

I think I get your point.

When you (or DaveN) talk about the pace of link growth going forward and about spikes in link growth patterns, etc. do you think the engineers are looking at the whole site and how it grows links or at a single page/document?

If they look at the whole site and expect steady link growth, wouldnt that mean you can never stop focussing on a site and take on new projects (b/c then the link growth would probably slow down a lot even if you continue to get links from the self-reinforcing nature of the process)?

Whereas if they looked at a single page/document they couldnt expect progressive(exp?) link growth as a natural pattern, but they could look at a single page/document and see if the initial link growth was only a spike (and then no further links or hardly any attracted by that piece of content).

Or if the initial link growth to that piece of content was big and slowed down - but only gradually (not from one day to the next).

For example when you launch a new SEO tool such as SEO for firefox more people will link to it during the first weeks after you launched it..and then people will continue to link to it but the number of new links to it will probably slow down gradually (unless your readership grew tremendously in the meantime).

I assume Im overthinking too much and this doesnt really matter a lot and if they do something like this whether they look at pages or at the website as a whole, they probably wouldnt be able to code their algorithms so narrowly that they'd devalue sites a lot if people took a step back from them to do something else?

Hi Patrick

I think some of the algorithms flag sites for spam or flag the sites for human review. Once flagged for human review your thousands of links may or may not count depending on the mood and mindset of a single Google engineer.

Old established sites can get a way with being a bit more spiky, but new sites get crushed if they are too spiky and can't maintain the forward momentum.

Sure you can take on new projects, but you shouldn't neglect the old ones. To be fair, I see some old sites I control that still rank after not building many links to them in a year, but those sites are in low competition verticals where the legit sites have no clue about SEO and overall link counts are quite low.

thanks for the reply Aaron,

so you think that unless you're in uncompetitive verticals the days of passive income streams (sites that you get to rank and once they rank at the top, you can stop building links actively and simply watch them stay there b/c they're self-reinforcing authorities) have sort of been numbered?

When you say "low competition verticals where legit sites have no clue about SEO and overall link counts are quite low" how many links are we talking about? (as a proxy for competition, I know quality of links > quantitiy of links)

I'm just curious about that b/c I'm wondering how important that will be for me in the near future as a field that's uncompetitive to you might be one I consider rather competitive.

Your question sorta hints at where a threshold exists...like by definition if you can stop building something and watch it stick you are either in an uncompetitive market or you have a self reinforcing authority.

I have some sites that are not authority sites, that I don't build new links to, that still rank at the top of Google's search results a year or two after I stopped building links. Those are quite uncompetitive markets.

When ranking those types of sites generally I am talking about only about 200 links to rank, with all but a dozen of them being easy to reproduce.

Aaron if I'm following right it sounds like the key is what happens after your linkbait and what happens to your baseline link growth.

Would you say the same could be applied to something like subscribers if we're talking about a blog. Say after a successful linkbait your subscribers increase 10% and remain. Might that also help in getting an engineer to count the links? Or is it really going to come down to links alone?

One strategy might be to consistently put out smaller linkbaits punctuated every so often by the big one. The spikes might not appear as spikey and you would probably be showing a consistent link growth.

I think if the subscribers were on topic then they naturally are going to link from time to time. For now I think it is mostly links.

Not sure if/when they will incorporate blog subscriber data. I am thinking that if they do incorporate blog subscriber data into the relevancy algorithms it might be done in an indirect manner more than a direct one, in order to filter out the ability to pass link equity from lower quality blogs that have few subscribers. Between Google Reader and Feedburner they have a good idea of what blogs should be trusted enough to be able to pass votes, IMHO.

Hi Aaron,

After a successful link bait that creates a relatively unnatural amount of back links, how much time do webmasters have to show consistent baseline growth before the spike gets discredited by Google? Do you think it's a matter of weeks, months, or longer? And is there any chance a spike would get discredited, but perhaps reevaluated later if the site starts to show consistently growing link numbers?

Hi Dave
I would be a liar if I tried to tell you that I know exactly what the thresholds are, but I can state that one of my blogs got a gray PageRank bar and is not in Google's cache after getting a few thousand links to a single linkbait article, and at one point Google even banned one of their own blogs.

I think new links have a way of making older links count more too, but I am not sure the exact mechanisms of it.

Totally agree. I've found link bait usually brings "hit and run" traffic who rarely subscribe to my blog or email newsletter.

err... i thought the web was all about generating high quality content? if that isnt what link bait is about then ive been barking up the wrong tree. the issues i have is converting baited hits to paying customers as most bait is non commercial in nature.

True, but people are inherently lazy and like shortcuts. Most linkbait is more toward the baity end than toward the quality end.

not sure if link baits work for smaller clients, as this takes time and clients who cannot afford around 1000 quid, we won't be able to do link baits for them can we?

Not all linkbait efforts cost $1,000+ ... but you are right that as SEO gets more expensive it will keep getting harder to *profitably* serve small businesses. Many unremarkable small businesses already have and will continue to get squeezed out of the search ecosystem.