It’s good but is it linkbait

by Patrick Altoft on April 28, 2008

Most of you have probably read the Google Search Results Missing from OneBox article on SEOmoz last week and been impressed by the huge amount of Diggs and traffic it generated.

Now I love SEOmoz as much as everybody else but in this case I really don’t think it was good linkbait. If an article gets on the Digg front page the average number of links is 300. This article got more Diggs than average and has just 66 links and a lot of those are from the scrapers that publish everything that gets on Digg.

I would class this as social media bait rather than linkbait because there isn’t a hook to encourage people to link to it. The reason so many people fail at linkbait is because they start publishing articles like this with no thought to why people would link to them – nobody links to linkbait without a reason.

The best viral campaign I’ve seen recently got 20 diggs (less than 100 times the number SEOmoz got) and currently has 15,000 links. That’s linkbait.

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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }

kelvin newman 28 Apr 2008 at 10:31 am: It’ll be interesting to see what get’s done with that domain given the link equity it’s got. It already ranks eighth on Google UK for ‘test’
Patrick Altoft 28 Apr 2008 at 10:39 am
Find me on Twitter: Yeah, and it’s only a month old. A more stunning search result is the fact it ranks 4th for the search term “here“.
More comments from Patrick Altoft
Kenneth Dreyer 28 Apr 2008 at 10:49 am: You would want to check the amount of links going to the seomoz articles now. its increased a bit..
Patrick Altoft 28 Apr 2008 at 11:12 am
Find me on Twitter: I see 54 instead of 66. What do you see?
More comments from Patrick Altoft
Ciaran 28 Apr 2008 at 12:00 pm: Hi Patrick,

Glad to see that you liked the dothetest campaign. The ironic thing is that the whole point of the campaign was, as you say, to go viral and not to attract links as such.

In fact our attempt at digging the dothetest site got over 500 diggs, whilst a version of the video on Break.com received more than 1,300. However because the whole aim was simply for as many people as possible to see it we really didn’t mind that people were reposting it and receive more diggs than our original version.

At some point we will redirect the site to a page on the main TFL site.

Cheers
Shane 28 Apr 2008 at 1:41 pm: Great insight, Patrick. I’ve never done much linkbait, and I look at the SEOmoz case and wish I could have a success like that without remembering the fact that, for the most part, all that traffic does is drag down your server. It doesn’t add any long-term value to your business.

Another great post.
Collin LaHay 29 Apr 2008 at 12:33 am: Went down for me as well…

That dothetest video is awesome.
Kimota 29 Apr 2008 at 1:02 am: I agree with everything in this article, but would add the point that not every post needs to, or even should be, linkbait. The fact that SEOmoz had a strong post that didn’t generate a massive number of links doesn’t detract that from the point that it was still a strong and successful post that no doubt attracted traffic and probably subscribers.

Trying to create linkbait for every single post would drive anyone insane very quickly. Linkbait is more about finding that little bit of gold that can go viral – and is often less about meat and more about gimmick. A successful blog also needs concrete content that serves the needs of the readers.
Chris Lang 29 Apr 2008 at 1:27 am: Articles on SEO usually bring down the house at Digg, many domains have been banned for discussing how Digg and search engine rankings go hand in hand.

I just published an article on Digg, the privacy breach at Digg and how it effects your search engine rankings.

http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=79

I have very detailed documentation but Digg has yet to address it.

In looking at your content I would like to know what you think either here on your blog, in my comments or feel free to email me. = Chris Lang