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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