“Linkbaiting” Case Study From Search Engine Watch
Posted by Helen Montgomery, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Link Building Thursday, 26 January 2006 07:18 6 Comments
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.
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.
Getting traffic nowadays are getting harder than it used to be. The sandbox effect really has its impact on the SEO efforts while PPC can really be expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Btw,have you heard of cost per action technique to get qualified leads? If not yet, you can download a free report from http://www.w3submit.com/noppc/
I’m looking for two types of case studies. I’m interested if you’re based in Scandinavia and run local search marketing campaigns, or have run campaigns for companies selling products or services in Scandinavia.
My main concern is that you can’t guarantee every page of your website will be included in the SERPs. Considering I’m constantly adding new products to my company’s website, I need to be sure that customers can find them as soon as possible.http://www.seoptimizerz.com
If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
Well i mostly see this kind of things in all blogs that peoples are always commenting about different matters and topics instead of the topic they are on to, so this kind of things really makes me upset, because i always expecting to spread conversation at this kind of blogs and forum for improves my knowledge base. http://www.Gordoniihoodia.net