What is Linkbait?
Simply put, linkbaiting is the creation of something online which you feel has the potential to go viral. “Going viral” means a piece of content is so engaging, funny, helpful, life-saving, disturbing or a combination of all five that people feverishly pass it around amongst their friends via IM and email. Scores of bloggers link to it because they want to share it with their audience. It becomes bookmarked naturally in tons of social media sites. The benefits are twofold. In the short term the popular webpage gets tons of direct traffic and brand recognition. In the long term the domain encourages many one-way incoming links which is a crucial factor the major search engines take into account when deciding where to rank your site for specific keywords. Here are some great articles regarding the construction of effective linkbait if you’d like to read more on the basics. I’d rather spend my bloggy time today showing you some real and original examples of linkbait I myself created – and
The term “linkbait” is used to describe content on a website which is designed to generate incoming links from other sites. Some people disagree with the use of this term, since it sounds pejorative, implying that all linkbaiting is bad, while other people think that the term is perfectly accurate, even with the negative connotations associated with the word “bait.” Almost every website participates in linkbaiting. Most people design websites with the intention of attracting readers, and as a result they try to generate material which is picked up and linked by other sites. However, there are varying degrees of linkbaiting, ranging from writing a useful guide to something to deliberately baiting the owner of another site by launching a personal attack on him or her. Some people who support the concept of creating linkbait frown on more aggressive tactics. In addition to typically immediately increasing traffic to a website, linkbaiting also drives a site up in search engine rankings, a
