Archive for the ‘Linkbait’ Category

I’m probably not going to make any friends with this post but I don’t care. Whitehat linkbait turned spam pisses me off because this type of junk is what ruins perfectly good link building techniques.

When Matthew Inman left SEOmoz and talked about his dating site and it’s accomplishments using linkbait, I was happy for him and truly impressed with his results. He took a simple idea like funny quizes and turned them into a backlink building machine using badges that linked back to both the quiz, and the dating site hosting the quiz. I don’t think anyone could consider it spam.

So yesterday I was talking with someone about how all this worked and went to show them an example and to my surprise, I see JustSayHi has turned Matt’s quizzes into a link spam machine. No longer do the links below the badges point to the dating site, they point to what looks like rotating, off topic affiliate sites. This reminds me of the hit counter spam that Google has been known to love.

Examples (nofollows added by me):

69%

Looking for payday loan?

54%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Find Ultrasound technician schools near you

Normally I’m not one to point out specific examples of shady SEO, but I am taking a hard stance against this particular technique. At this time, Google and the other search engines consider badges and widget a white hat technique but if normally white hat companies pull this junk too many times, this form of linkbait will sleep with the fishes (paid links).

Update: Looks like they changed back to only linking to themselves. Lets hope it stays that way.

Andy Hagans has posted the most in depth Linkbait Guide I’ve come across yet. Most of the info has been said before but I haven’t seen all this info in one article before and laid out so well.

The only network I think he dropped the ball on is Fark. If you go with a humor hook, Fark is a must. I know a guy that gets tons of traffic from it. We are talking the same traffic numbers as he gets from Digg.

I’d also add a few more headlines and a blog opening section from CopyBlogger.

Hat Tip to Stuntdubl for the heads up.

Jeremy Shoemoney woke up to a big surprise. I feel for him. It happens to the best of us. I’m glad he was able to get everything back up and running pretty quick.

RustyBrick made an interesting post at on SERoundtable.

What if you had a semi-popular site and hacked the site yourself to get people talking about your site and linking to it?

With only a small following or community, this type of link bait could return a number of quick links without much effort. “Black Hat Link Bait” anyone? I’m almost tempted to try this on s popular site, but I’m too honest. I also have to ask myself what the consequences would be on my community if they found out it was a hoax.