Links are arguably the most important aspect of receiving visitors. Not only will links help you rank high in the big three (Google, Yahoo, MSN), but it will also expand brand recognition and give quality traffic to your site through blogs mentioning your link bait.
The issue involving SEO and SEM is quite simple. The more links, the better. Of course, if the links come from quality resources it helps all the better.
Quality sites have faithful visitors just waiting to blog about the newest trend or cool picture. Once a website like Digg, Reddit or a large blogs like Engadget pick up the story, your site will receive almost an instant 100+ links, not to mention the 10,000+ unique visitors from the site themselves.
To receive such quality traffic there is something called “linkbait”. Linkbaiting is, simply enough, baiting people to link to your site. Generally this is done by having quality content which people want to see.
However, there is something else brewing beneath the sheets which goes largely un-talked about: non-ethical aka “blackhat” linkbaiting.
A few examples of blackhat linkbaiting are:
- Send me money or I’ll cut the rabbits head off – This one was true enough. The guy got his money and his fifteen minutes of fame.
- Selling wedding dress of divorced wife over the Internet, it’s the only thing i have left of her – Pretty recent, but made the front page of Digg. Frontpage of Digg equals about 10,000 visitors, hundreds of links and the possibility of news organizations around the world picking up the story.
- Dissing large bloggers and making a big deal of it. – This is something which is a little less popular, but it does work. Making fun of a large blogger can mean a great link from said blogger. Not only that, everyone who blogs about what you said will give links.
Of course, doing this sort of thing has its negatives.
Problems it may cause:
- A PR nightmare. Everyone and their baby will be blogging about what an ass you are. This guy is killing a rabbit! What an asshole!
- It could, at least in theory, bring lawsuits your way. If you said something degrading towards a blogger which in turn hurts the bloggers image immensely, you could be in deep do-do. Of course, in some cases this will help as well. Lawsuits can bring great linkjuice. Just make sure it is worth it before making the decision to say harmful things against semi-celebrities.
Good things that can happen:
- Tons of links. Even links from websites hating on you, links are links.
- Tons of quick visitors. Within a period of days the article/stunt can bring thousands of visitors.
- People tend to forget about stunts quickly, but they remember brands.
Written: Oct 2, 2007
0 Responses to "Creating non-Ethical Linkbait"
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
