“Linkbaiting” Case Study From Search Engine Watch
Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 7:18 am by Helen Montgomery, AC Magazine
Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker has written up a case study on “linkbaiting.” According to Baker’s interesting post:
“Link baiting (or linkbaiting) is the emerging art of building a useful tool, writing an interesting article, or running a newsworthy ‘event’ on a web site which naturally attracts links.”
The case study cites examples of linkbaiting:
“…running a contest which includes multiple sites (such as blog contests or niche site award contests), testing a new advertising format… and throwing a wrench into a breaking or popular news story via attacks, a new spin, or a dash of humor. If anything, the social web and blogosphere have made linkbaiting a reality which only existed for a select few who already enjoyed broad reach and incredible viral marketing skills years ago.”
In other words, linkbaiting is simply viral marketing that attracts backlinks quickly - something that’s an integral part of the business model we use for our step-by-step virtual training in Affiliate Classroom.
The case study goes on to explain how Search Engine Journal organized a “Best Search Engine Blogs” contest that generated tons of traffic - and got backlinks from all over the web, including the blog of Matt Cutts, Senior Google Engineer.
What can affiliates learn from this case study? How about a clever way to generate plenty of incoming links and targeted traffic - without investing anything more than time? It’s also a great strategy for bloggers who need to generate buzz - and gets links - from sites outside the blogsphere.
Matt Cutts even came up with some terrific examples and creative ideas for linkbaiting.
And if you’ve developed a mailing list or an upsell, you can combine these simple ideas with the more detailed strategies outlined in our November Case Study on “Do Affiliate Marketing Contests Pay Off? YES!” available in our members only training center. In it we explain how our recent Thanksgiving Competition generated a 15% sustained sales increase - and 6 new joint venture strategic partnerships - for very low cost.
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Very good post – I think the “linkbaiting” concept is something that affiliates should really start thinking about. And the “bait” doesn’t have to be anything more than a quality site.
I know that many affiliates are still into creating “throw away” sites that take advantage of the available loopholes in Google or other engine’s algorithms – but I also see the affiliates who bank on these concepts getting less and less traffic as the algorithms mature.
This trend has led to a surge in search engine optimizing affiliates who are into creating quality sites without all of the garbage content and tricky redirects that used to dominate our space (insurance). At this point the affiliates still use some tricks, don’t get me wrong, but the end user experience tends to be much better than the sites you would see them slap together a couple of years ago.
I also think the growing interest in “linkbaiting,” especially for larger affiliates and marketers, is a direct result of the continuous decline in effectiveness of paid text link ads and reciprocal linking. I think it can be said that, in general, site-to-site reciprocal linking is ineffective in optimizing for competitive terms. And I believe it is just a matter of time before the “link juice” of paid links is all but removed from the Google algorithm. When that happens, the quality sites with “real” earned links will be the ones left standing.
As Web users we should all be glad to see that site owners are growing more and more interested in the creation of “linkbait.” Why? Because link bait is, by nature, quality content. And if sites are focused on creating quality content, everyone wins.