When we first talked about link baiting in class, I thought it was a bad thing. I thought it would be equal to catfishing or click baiting. Basically, I initially thought the point was to trick people to click on your links and add your link to their own page through deceitful tactics. However, this is not the purpose of link baiting. Link baiting is leveraging authoritative websites in your industry (the most powerful linkers) into sending traffic and links to your site. This does not have to be done in a tricky or terrible manner, but rather it is through crafting content that then people will want to link your site.
Bad Link Baiting Practices
Sweet recommends for us to not engage in certain practices for trying to get links. To begin, he recommends to not get excessive irrelevant links, excessive link exchanges, or even buy links. Google searches for websites that not only have links, but also the quality of links. For example, I am working on a site for my family’s business, Battery Warehouse Plus. I could try to get a link to a random business that has nothing to do with the business, or I could work to craft content that would interest people at The Battery Show. One of these has more authority over the other (it is the second option). Having a lot of links can be good, but that is not all that matters and that is not all the impacts the site. Quantity will come when your site has good content. Additionally, Sweet warns again having artificial content that attempts to pass authority– this uses black hat practices, like keyword spam or text ads. Here, there is a lack of substance to the content that is supposed to help the user.
The Bottom Line
You need to share content and suggest links where appropriate. Through crafting good content, the backlinking will come.
3 Responses
Love this! I actually wrote a lot about the same thing, link baiting. It sounds negative at first but it actually practical and helpful to yourself and potentially even others too! Great post.
This is a great explanation of what link baiting is. To most it does sound like a negative term and so most people will assume they shouldn’t use it for their website. But they should because it is very important for the website’s SEO.
I definitely agreed with you on the thought that link baiting was a bad thing. This post does a great job of clarifying why link baiting is inherently good while also highlighting how it can be used negatively.