When one first hears the term linkbaiting they are immedieatly reminded of their unseemly cousin, clickbaiting. Linkbaiting may share the family resemblance, but it falls far from the family tree.
To outline the deviance from family traditions we will define what ethical SEO practice look like. This is more commonly referred to as White Hat SEO. The most important thing is making sure ones SEO practices follow search engine’s guidelines, that way the search engine thinks you are ethical. The second most important thing is to make sure the user thinks you are ethical. This can be done by writing good content and having a functioning webpage. If a user reads repetitive text stuffed with keywords or clicks links that don’t send them where they say they will, the user loses trust in the site. In total, ethical SEO gains the trust of search engines and users.
Linkbaiting is used to describe the way SEO can build back links to the site. All good link building strategies must follow search engine guidelines or else face penalties as SEs are very against nefarious link building strategies. The reason SEs want ethical link building is because it ensures a good user experience. If SEOs only care about following guidelines and not user experience they might step into the territory of Grey Hat SEO, questionable practices that haven’t been banned by the guidelines yet and may be unethical. But, if SEOs focus on user experience and ethics first, instead of the guidelines, they will never have to work about SEs catching on to unethical behavior and penalizing them in the future.
If we take a look at some of the most effective linkbaiting techniques we can see that they are all above board and do not decrease from user experience or violate SE guidelines. Some examples are: links from unlinked brand mentions, creating original digital assets or tools, reclaiming broken links, and reverse engineering competitor links. When user experience is considered, backlinks will come from sites relevant to one’s site’s desired audience. It is also important to share and promote your content, this will not only create backlinks but bring visitors to a site too.
Linkbaiting is an ethical practice rooted in honesty to users, supported by search engine guidelines, that brings flourishing to webmasters and users alike.
One Response
I like the thought behind this topic, this is something not talked about super frequently. I enjoyed learning more about it from your post.