Linkbait
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What is linkbait?
Linkbait and Link Bait are used interchangeably.
Linkbait is the internet marketing equivalent of fishing bait. Linkbait is simply content or web tools created specifically to entice people to link to from their website or blog, or tell others about it.
All content and web tools are linkable content you might say. Yes, to a certain extent that is true. But linkbait content is different. Linkbait content has to be better or different from the usual content to attract more than the usual share of links.
Examples of good Linkbait content include:
- Viral content, such as the hilarious Evolution of Dance video that's been viewed 36,758,020 (Dec. 13, 2006) times on the YouTube website.
- Controversial content
- Useful web tools, such as Alexaholic which allows you to compare the Alexa traffic rankings of up to 5 domains simultaneously. According to Yahoo!, Alexaholic has a whopping 17,493 links pointing to it (not including links from the Alexaholic domain itself), and the domain was set up as recently as February 2006.
- "How To" articles
- Top 10, 30, 50 lists
- 101 tips
- Inside knowledge
- "Cool" stuff
Matt Cutts, head of the Google's Webspam team, discusses a few examples of linkbaiting in this SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting post.
Is linkbait just about attracting links?
Yes and no. Links usually equals traffic, so attracting links is the main reason for creating linkbait content. But many web surfers don't actually have a website to post links to. As such, they might bookmark or tell others about it via an online bookmarking service, such as Digg or Del.icio.us.
- Digg is a social content website. Every article or link is submitted and voted on by the Digg community. The more "diggs" your link gets, the higher it will rank, and therefore the more traffic it will attract. If your link receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of Digg visitors to see. Digg is so popular that a listing has been known to create huge surges of traffic to the "Dugg" site, and crashing the server. This is referred to by some as the "Digg effect".
- Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website primarily used to store bookmarks online, which can be accessed from any computer. This too works in a similar fashion to Digg with the more times a site is bookmarked, the higher it's ranked, and subsequently the more traffic it attracts.
So, linkbait also has the potential of attracting a great deal of traffic, in addition to links.
Site Map:
- Text Link Guide - homepage
- Text Links - search engines, link traffic
- Anchor Text - variations, misspellings
- Image Links - image maps, alt text
- PageRank - increase PageRank, attribute
- Link Popularity - authority pages, link quality, quantity, relevancy, reputation
- Sitemaps - XML, Google, generators, Yahoo!
- Linkbait
- Link Seeding - link spam
- Link Exchange - bad neighborhoods, link exchange software
- Sponsored Links - PageRank
- Affiliate Links
- Link Brokers - RON, ROS, Text Link Ads
- Natural Linking - artificial linking, link triangles, www or non-www
- Broken Links - link rot, broken link testing
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