December 1, 2006 Well, I’m back from vacation and getting back into the swing of things. Over the large feast, a friend of the family asked about link popularity and what the best method of gaining quality links would be. I offered the advice of link baiting. Link baiting is the method of providing relevant and «buzz worthy» content or subject matter on your site, inducing the desire of other site owners to link to you without your request. This will look a lot more natural to Google than the sudden spike in IBL’s due to submitting to hundreds of directories in a day.
Education
Ahhh….yet another reason that quality text is important. Having a nice, attention grabbing text is a great way to get others to link to you. Creating something informative and/or useful in writing can help. Articles on you subject matter, giving tricks of the trade or the like will usually yield link bait.
Negative PR
Something we are starting to see a lot of is purposefully creating a controversial statement in hopes of link baiting. The problem I have with this method is the idea that it won’t always give you the traffic you want. Also, playing with negative PR is a scary thing on the Internet. A blog that gets more traffic than you will likely post something that will have a lot more staying power in the search engines, resulting in a bad online reputation when someone searches for the company name. Also, once the buzz stops and passes, where will that leave your link popularity.
Free Tools
My favorite, and one of the best ways to link bait is to offer a free tool on your site that helps others in your community. This blog often links to neat new tools we find.
In the end, link baiting was the original way of gaining link popularity, and though it has gone through a few changes in definition and methodology, it’s coming back again. These are just a few and most popular of the methods, and people are coming up with new and inventive ways almost every day.
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