What is Linkbait? Guidelines for Building Links
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
Over the past few weeks, I have been researching the meaning of “linkbaiting” and its effect on blogs and what it might do to assist a newer blog in getting off the ground. As we all know the popularity of your blog goes hand in hand with how many links you have back to your content from other sites. This of course helps out your Google PageRank as well as your Technorati authority and rank; which is also key in bringing your site and its content higher up the ladder for searched terms.
Throughout my research I came to a realization about the term linkbait; there are two school’s of thought about the subject and also two types of linkbaiting. There are those that believe that linkbaiting is a way to trick other bloggers into linking you. The term “baiting” gives off a sense of it being a dirty or underhanded activity; which, in some cases is an accurate belief. Others believe that if the content is well-written and informative, by all means it should be linked to.
I have found that the idea of linkbaiting is a tightrope walk that could go either way…good or bad. I found a great Introduction to Linkbaiting by Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) where he summarizes the idea of linkbaiting being good or bad as “My own opinion on whether link bait is good or bad is that it depends upon the type of link baiting that you’re talking about. I think some techniques that people use are just good standard blogging techniques - while other things that people do in the pursuit of links are destructive to the blogging community and I’d argue against them.” In an essence some linkbaiting that borders on the destructive path could be construed as spam or malicious to the community.
