How link-baiting should be done…kind of..!

10th February 2009 · Paddy · No Comments »

You have probably heard by now of a somewhat controversial blog post written by a guy called John Dvorak. In his post he gives several examples of how SEO hasn’t worked for him. One of which being an example of how changing his page URLs to “friendly” URLs actually resulted in a decline in traffic! Now I haven’t got access to the specifics of John’s website but my personal experience is that changing URLs to friendly, keyword driven URLs can help search referrals for a broader range of keywords. This works especially well for Ecommerce websites where you name product pages in line with the product name.

Combine this with the other basic on-page SEO factors and you are increasing your chances of ranking well for product name searches. Ok I’ll accept that this will probably not bring a huge amount of traffic because they searches are quite niche, however the traffic you do get will be much more targeted and more likely to convert.

Anyway, the point of this post was to highlight what John Dvorak has done – he has written some link bait.

My personal definition of Link Bait from what I’ve read – A blog post/article which is written to be somewhat controversal and attract attention from other people in the same industry who then start talking about this article. In doing so they will more than likely link to it. Boosting the authors link count. Get the idea?

The problem with John Dvorak is that he has written (I think) link bait that will attract the attention of the SEO/SEM industry. Now the difference between this industry and others is that SEO guys and gals know this tactic and will mostly not fall for it. They will not directly link to the post, they will use redirects/short URLs/no follow etc so that John Dvorak doesn’t benefit from their links.

If this was done in another industry where the audience are not so internet savvy then this can be a fantastic way of attracting links and attention to your website.

In terms of attracting attention, John has certainly been successful with that. Matt Cutts even Twittered about it whilst attending SMX.

Now Patricio Robles has written this great post in response to John’s link bait which summarises all of his points much better than I can.

If you are interested in learning more about link bait, here is a good resource from the guys at SEOmoz.