{"id":14,"date":"2006-02-21T12:17:33","date_gmt":"2006-02-21T20:17:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/21\/the-power-of-linkbait\/"},"modified":"2006-02-21T12:17:33","modified_gmt":"2006-02-21T20:17:33","slug":"the-power-of-linkbait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/21\/the-power-of-linkbait\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Linkbait"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, it all started with USA Today publishing an article on SEO which was so poorly written that it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stand any criticism – and of course people in the SEO community picked on it and posted about it and certainly linked to it – Aaron Wall posted about it on Threadwatch<\/a>, Lee Odden posted about it on his blog<\/a>, as many others probably did (heck I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d rather link to these fine folks than to that shitty article – and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll explain here why). Well, shitty it may be, but look how it got a pack of quality links in a matter of hours? Roughly speaking, now if Google picks up all these links and people then search for SEO-related stuff what they will see is an article linked ot by many SEO authorities – ahha thinks Google, this is probably a good candidate for top rankings for SEO-related stuff! And unsuspecting searchers looking for SEO information end up going to an article which contans a lot of misconcepts instead of valuable SEO information\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

I even had a little discussion with Lee in his post\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s comments stating my point that linking in abundance to something like that can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be a good thing – but what could he really do? A link was appropriate when talking about this exceptional product of incompetence – so he linked, and so did others. I wonder if it all means that if I get on my computer tomorrow and write up and article about some industry I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know anything about I would get a ton of links form the top sites in that industry? Hmm, interesting\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 but as long as search engines cannot consider properly the context of links, a link is a link is a link.<\/p>\n

So the lessons we have to learn from this little story are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Even those who know nothing about SEO can create a powerful linkbait;<\/li>\n
  2. The real good linkbait is irresistable – love it or hate it, but you will end up linking to it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Well, it all started with USA Today publishing an article on SEO which was so poorly written that it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stand any criticism – and of course people in the SEO community picked on it and posted about it and certainly linked to it – Aaron Wall posted about it on Threadwatch, Lee Odden posted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}