Tag Archives: linkbait

Social Media Networks are Highly Effective at getting Rid of “Linkbait”

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There is always a bit of chatter about what Google will do when Social Media Linkbaiting becomes so mainstream everyone will be doing it. Will they De-value the particular page if it has a high ratio of social media links indicating that this pages authority was driven by social media linkbaiting, or will they simply not trust a site that has “social media spam” signals?

Personally, I don’t think they will have to do a thing. The Networks are doing a very good job at stamping out what is deemed to be spam. Digg installed a toolbar to artificially inflate it’s traffic whist making it almost pointless to spam Digg anymore as lazy bloggers will be linking to the short Digg URL instead of the targeted one. Reddit has become heavily moderated and now deletes many stories, while others get too many downvotes to reach the from page. Finally, Stumble Upon’s algo has advanced quickly and not nearly as many stories are getting 5 stars and going popular. Also, Stumble Upons traffic is of a much lower quality that of Reddit or Digg (you didn’t think it could get any lower right!), but it can! Stumble Upon’s users are much less likely to link, that’s because the profile of the users is different to those of the other two main networks in that stories are random and forced and not chosen.

Of course, there are other networks, Plurk, Twitter, etc, but in our experience, these do not work well for “links”. I think “link baiters” are being forced to go and find new ways to get links while staying within Google’s guidelines.

99% of Links Don’t Work on Google

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If you consider yourself an SEO, then you must know that links = ranking on the search engines. When I first started out, virtually any old crappy link would do. Even FFA links worked okay and got your website ranking well.

However, times have changed, and since 2003 and it has become much harder to rank your site well, especially on Google. This is because Google has changed its search algorithm and is filtering the majority of links.

Google filters out and doesn’t trust the vast majority of links on the Internet, and I estimate this to be as high has 99% of all links. If you’ve been in SEO a while, I’m sure you have tried to broker some bargain deal where a guy in India will do “1000 directory submissions for $50″, only to discover it was the worst $50 you’ve ever spent.

If you want your site to rank, forget about “wholesale” links. These include links from directories, article sites, forums and similar places where you can go and get “a lot of links” without any editorial judgment easily. Even paid links fall into this category, with a high percentage of paid links being filtered out. Even what are deemed as “bulk” links where you can make 3-way link exchanges don’t work very well.

“Mechanical SEO” is almost dead. Where you can churn out a website, get some links and rank well. It’s so much harder to obtain decent rankings on Google, the algo is very SPAM resistant.

However, it is still possible to obtain good links, and the easiest and most cost effective way is through link bait. Linkbaiting can be a hundred times easier than going out and manually tryng to find non-filtered links. A good piece of link bait can generate tens of thousands of links, and can be created in a couple of days.

Linkbait Success Without the Social Networks

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I was inspired to do a post on how to linkbait without using the social networks. That means not submitting to Digg, Reddit or any other of the big network sites and still having your piece go viral.

Too many people see the social networks as the only key to their success. If you spend several days creating a widget, great article or whatever. You want to make sure that it stands the best chance of gaining traction and getting a ton of traffic and hopefully links.

The key to your success is in two parts:

1) A fantastic piece of bait:

Good promotion on Digg, Stumble or some of the other networks can hide a crappy piece of bait. If you want your linkbait to gain serious momentum outside of the networks your bait needs to be exceptional. It really does need to be good enough so that you can gain some links without asking.

Linkbait

2) Good relationships with other bloggers: *

Getting some linkbait viral needs good exposure at the start, you need to get plenty of eyeballs on your bait. Once a small group of people start blogging about your bait more people should see their blogs and then those will catch on and all of a sudden you’ll have thousands of visitors and these should translate into links.

I think it’s hard to make relationships with influential bloggers, it’s also very time consuming. However, it’s something you should do as you develop your business. The most successul SEO’s and linkbaiters all have good relationships with each other. Aaron Wall from SEO Book is a big advocator of business relationships between bloggers.

There is a quicker way to getting high exposure on influential, busy blogs. The way to do that is to find bloggers who do sponsored posts. Imagine if your linkbait was mentioned on Shoemoney’s blog? It’s almost guaranteed to take off if the piece has been designed properly. I personally use this method for some of my linkbait pieces and it works very, very well. I’ve never used Shoemoney’s blog though as he is pretty expensive – at around $4000 per review.

The best way to find some people to blog about your piece is to use the blog networks, I’d say Review Me was the best. You could get your linkbait viral within a matter of days if you select the correct blogs to go onto. Stay away from the low end Blog networks like Pay-Per-Post as many of the blogs don’t have enough traffic to get your piece viral, and will make your linkbait look like spam should a Google engineer look into it.

Don’t forget to ask the blog owner to “nofollow” the post, so you stay within Googles guidelines. You don’t need to worry about not having those few links that have been “nofollowed” as your piece should go viral and you may get thousands of legitimate links.

Lastly, there is one more way of linkbaiting without the Social Networks, and that is to email relevant bloggers with your linkbait and see if you can get a few dozen links. It’s a little harder than using a blog network as the linkbait really needs to appeal to them. Building relationships with relevant bloggers doesn’t hurt either. I’ll save that for another post though.