Linkbait, Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exagerated
April 27th, 2007 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Recently I’ve come across an increasing number of ‘link bait is dying’, ‘link bait is dead’, and ‘linkbait is so 2006′ blog posts. To those people I say, please remove your head from ass quickly, because you look ridiculous.
As proof of what I’m saying look at the magazine cover to the right. Not the girl the article titles.
How to Have All the Dates You Can Handle
Are Your Savings Shrinking? Smart Advice About Money.
Are You a Sexual Sleeping Beauty?
I don’t think you’d do a double take if you saw those titles on Digg, Delicious, Netscape or Reddit tommorow morning. Would it surprise you to learn that that magazine is from 1991 making it over 15 years old?
Need more proof take a gander at this edition of Readers Digest. To save you the trouble of squinting I’ll point out some of my favortites:
41 Ways to beat the High Cost of Living
How to Murder Your Husband
What the Moon really Reveals
In case you missed the date thats from August 1970, that’s over 35 years ago. Yep that’s right the exact same thing that some of you whiny bloggers are complaining about today has been going on in the print world for hundreds and thousands of years.
. Want to take a guess why … because it works.
Here’s the the thing lots of people don’t understand what real link bait is. Some people get all hung up on the word ‘bait’, saying it has some negative connotation of being a trap. Please get over it. The second group think it’s all about the catchy title. The catchy title is important it’s the hook, but it’s also a contract between you and the reader. It’s an agreement of what you’re going to provide if the person on the other end follows through and reads.
Believing link bait is a passing fad is like believeing good compelling content is somehow going to go out of style. Really people you should have been developing that type of content before it just was never solidified behind a quick and easy sound bite phrase like ‘link bait’. What has changed is link bait is more focused and effiecient. For example lets look at this illustration:
Traditionally most people only targeted the general users when developing their content. However link baiting is more concerened with targeting people who use social bookmarking sites like digg, delicious, netscape, reddit, and so on to vote/promote/bookmark their sites. All this voting puts the stories in front of the linkerati the one’s who run websites/blogs (some more powerful and influential than others) and can and do give links freely. So link bait isn’t exactly the same as it always was, it just become more focused on a subset of the online population.
Is link bait always going to stay the same, nope. In fact I fully expect things like personalized search to cause another shift in focus as we get a better understanding of how it’s being used in personalized SERP’s.
You’ve got a choice sit around and hope things go back to the way they were in 1999 and there was no MSSA penalty, you can start to learn how to do link bait, or get someone on your staff who does, because link bait just like great content is here to stay.
Sphere It
April 27th, 2007 at 8:31 am
I definitely agree - the overall objective of what linkbait is to accomplish will not change - it will just get renamed and revisited in early 2008 for use with whatever the applications are for driving traffic and links at that point. Perhaps someone should start a contest for new name suggestions.
April 27th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Micheal is exactly right. Think of it this way. When blogging and online chatter was new, there were so few producers that skill was not the biggest criteria. So headlines could be bland and still get attention.
But as more people started producing online content, and those that started earlier got better at it, the need for more sophisticated writing and headlines to gain attention has increased.
Now if you just throw out a quick boring headline you will never gain any attention. Just like Cosmo and Readers digest fight for your attention at the checkout counter, linkbait headlines fight for your attention on Digg.
It really is a matter of online content has improved dramatically over the past 5 years.
April 27th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Human nature hasn’t changes since, um…., Adam & Eve, so it probably won’t change in our lifetimes.
People still want to read about … people.
No sense fighting it, just use it.
Great post, especially thanks for the link leaks which further my reading.
April 27th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Amen brother
April 27th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Right on Michael - I agree completely. I’m sure a hundred years ago someone was saying “this whole writing thing is a fad” too.
Arousing people’s interest and curiosity will never go out of style.
The only part that the naysayers probably do have right is: now that everyone is on to the game, you’ll really have to get your gameface on to compete with everyone else who is fishing in the same channels.
April 27th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
You did not just go there with the removing the head from ass thing! haha
I totally agree. What’s so bad with getting your posts in front of lots of interested people and maybe a good chunk of them agree and discuss this as well as create some benefitual backlinks.
April 27th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Well said Michael. I’ve also had a suspicion that many who are proclaiming linkbait dead are doing so simply because they aren’t particularly good at creating it.
April 27th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Good on you for saying it, Michael. I’ve read a number of these articles over the last few weeks, including those written by people who I previously respected, and questioned which part of the concept of linkbait they were missing.
TV commercials are effectively offline linkbait. They simply manoeuvre people to perform an action - i.e. purchase a product. Writing a targeted headline for your blog is no different. In this case, the action is to read your post and then link to it.
If linkbait is dead, are TV commercials dead too? If so, as an actor, I’m doubly screwed…
April 27th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
It continues to amaze me that posts like this need to be written, but thank you for doing it nonetheless.
I figure we only need to keep repeating it for two more years before people start to get it.
April 27th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Long live Linkbait 2.0
April 27th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Perfect. 100% agree.
Web Marketing meet [insert medium] Marketing.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:56 am
Link baiting is a new and progressive method of increasing link popularity.
You can easily create quality content on Link Bait .once it is online people will come to know about your views and wouls automatically link to it. It is more or less anything you create anywhere on the Web that inspires other people to link to it.
Link baiting involves a list of 6 hooks thar are generally known as
News
contrary
attack
resource
humor
fear
are the hooks every avid link baiter must master.
The above given points are very useful but it involves a lot of hard workwriting high quality content and proper popluarity.palcomonline is a web design development and hosting company based in noidawe provide expert seo services.
palcomonline.com