Is Link Bait A Viable SEO Strategy?
Link Bait is the practice of adding content to your site that draws an enormous number of natural links, which serve to push that page higher up in the search engines and therefore creating more opportunities to get more links. Is this practice manipulative? Is it is a good and white hat search engine optimization strategy? Will it always work?
OK, these are three distinct questions. I’ll answer them one at a time.
- Is link bait manipulative? Yes. It is. In fact, just about everything you do online is manipulative in one sense or another. Optimization, by its nature, is manipulative. So, yes, link baiting is manipulative and that’s OK.
- Is it good SEO? That depends on who you ask, but if you ask me then I’ll give an unqualified and resounding “yes”. Link bait is sound SEO.
- Will link bait always work? I think so. The reason link bait works now is because it does the one thing that search engines thrive on. It is the creation of content that is so good that it draws natural links in very high numbers. The search engines love natural links. They don’t care if those links are developed in high numbers over a short period of time or over a long period of time. What they do care about is whether or not a website unnaturally builds links – that’s bad. But natural links gained using powerful SEO strategies are encouraged. Link bait is good and always will be.
The problem with link bait is that it is hard to pull off successfully. Hard, but not impossible.
9 Responses to “Is Link Bait A Viable SEO Strategy?”
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If you have content that other people would like to reference and link that’s not manipulation, that’s popularity of good content.
Hi Art – That is very true, your content should be very good and written to enhance your user experience not just get links through link bait…
I support your comment above Nick.
I did some SEO for a company in the ‘sample letter’ niche.
The top 2 or 3 spots were held by legit companies with great content and seo strategies. The one I SEO-ed eventually got there as well. However, we were never able to beat out the top spot held by a company that SEOs for free letters and gives away simply to draw traffic to their primary model of homebiz and office supplies for which they rank very poorly in SEO.
The company with the free letters allows for free copy-and-paste and free use, and their letters are available around the net from other sites; their content is therefore not unique and widely duplicated. Yet, they remain in that top spot because of so many sites linking to them.
Kudos to those other sites who have posted their free letters openly online. At least they didn’t market themselves as if they were something they are not.
Link Bait could be effective if you consider keyword research before you start writing. Then, you should use your selected keywords at your post’s key positions. This is the minimum you can do for attracting links.
[...] question, right? I mean, we just talked about link baiting. That’s [...]
Hi RobN – Thanks for providing an example of a good link bait approach for all of our readers!
Hi Website Promotion Guy – Excellent point, knowing the keyword phrases you want to target within your link bait campaign is a must! Thanks for the comment!
By defining how their search engine works, Google wants us to create good content. So if we do so, and get links, I can’t really see them penalising you for doing what they request. If they did, I’d be surprised if you had trouble getting reinstated.
Hi Tao – I agree with you building highly relevant incoming links through a link bait by enhancing the user experience by providing excellent content, is totally the way to go and is indeed a clean and white hat SEO approach…
I agree that Link Baiting is good SEO. Even more importantly, Google agrees that Link Baiting is good SEO (see Matt Cutts’ 2009 WordCamp presentation).
This is extremely important to know since the goal of all SEO efforts is to rank higher in search engines (especially Google with 65%+ market share). If a practice can help you build links and traffic to your website, and it is endorsed by Google, by all means use it!