Linkbait, Not Just Bloodworms and Grass Shrimp

Linkbait, Not Just Bloodworms and Grass Shrimp

We dabbed a bit into Linkbaiting earlier in the week with a bit on natural link building done by Randfish at SEOmoz. Linkbaiting is a link building technique used by sites which is actually quite simple, do something or create something on your site which gives other sites and bloggers a reason to link to you.

At a time when mass reciprocal linking is dying and even leading to penalized sites by search engines, natural linking is becoming more and more important. Some sites, especially in the SEO world, build useful tools that other site owners are willing to share with the world, via linking. Other forms of Linkbaiting could be performing some original research or hosting Janet Jackson sunbathing videos on your site (if you have the available bandwidth).

Nick Wilson from Performancing (and ThreadWatch) posted a nice review of Linkbait Hooks for the average site looking for more natural links in his post, The Art of Linkbaiting:

Even established blogs need to expand their traffic and influence on a regular basis, and linkbaiting is one way to do it. It’s not without potential perils, but the time honored tradition of being contrary, in order to get attention is well proved, and done right, it’s a killer way to break into a new area. There are also safer ways of linkbaitng, they’re just less fun.

In order to bait a link, you need a hook. Hooks come in variety of flavors, some of the more popular would include:

* News hook
* Contrary Hook
* Attack Hook
* Resource Hook
* Humour Hook

There are others, but you see the point. There are two main types of hook in there, the nice hook, and the nasty hook. I’d say in most cases you can get away with a contrarian viewpoint, but not an attack. No one likes an arsehole, so there’s no real benefit, as sure you may get a ton of links from outraged blog peers, but they’ll likely ignore anything else you write.