Linkbait: New Term for Old Tactics?  Subscribe to our feed!

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Perhaps “linkbait” is just a buzzword? At SES alone, we probably heard it muttered a million and one times. Chris Boggs, Search Strategist for Avenue A | Razorfish points out that “linkbait has been kinda beaten to death as a topic recently… but it’s very important.”

For the three people who’ve never heard of this SEO tactic, Boggs describes it as “primarily the idea of generating content with the ulterior motive of driving links in a natural manner to [a] particular page.”

Sounds familiar, eh? “Build it and they will come.” Perhaps it’s that simple?

Maybe.

Since “linkbait” can mean far more than plain, old, quality content, things get a bit complex.

Darron Rowse (of Problogger) states, “It is actually a difficult term to be definitive about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs… In reality the term ‘linkbaiting’ is a new term for something that webmasters have been doing for many years.”

Then there’s the connotation of the term “bait.” It sounds a bit malicious, misleading, misinforming perhaps? Certainly, there are poor uses of this tactic in the wild, but isn’t that the case with anything?

Boggs argues that the “build it and they will come” mentality is a bit flawed.

“[There are] purists out there who feel that LB should be purely that… and that it has to be worthy to link to… when in fact you really do have to go out and do a little bit of link building to generate the knowledge that the link exists.”

Regardless of how sweet the bait is, it’ll take some other bait to get folks to notice.

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