Beginners Guide to Linkbait

by Patrick Altoft on June 29, 2007

Linkbait is the act of adding content to a website with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take a variety of different forms from a unique tool or a breaking news story to a well written article or controversial image.

Sometimes linkbait is intentional but quite often the best linkbait is conceived quite by accident.

My favourite piece of link bait is the Adobe Acrobat Reader software. The download page has over 15 million links and is probably the most linked internal page on the web today.

Creating your linkbait

The first step to thinking of a really cool tool, unique news story or article is to find out what people want to read about. It sounds simple but following the breaking stories on the various social networking sites as well as Technorati and the BlogStorm Tracker will give you a unique insight into the weeks hot topics.

Another good tip is to search the social bookmarking sites for things related to your site that have been popular in the past. You might find a nice tool that was on Digg 2 years ago and be able to use it to inspire something more modern for your site.

A quick look at some popular tools in different areas is often a good source of inspiration. For example you might see a tool on a car/auto website for valuing used cars and be able to apply it to your real estate site.

Top 10 lists

Although top 10 lists are very popular on sites like Digg they are actually the least successful kind of link bait. Most of the reputable sites won’t bother linking to a top 10 list unless it is really amazing or offers new information. You could try using a top 10 list to build a short burst of traffic but don’t expect a link from Engadget in return.

Articles

Well written articles or tutorials are an art form and are one of the hardest link bait methods to pull off unless you are well known or an exceptional writer. The article would need to be very well written and perfectly targeted towards your audience to succeed. If you want to try link baiting some quality articles you should concentrate on writing content that will help people, content that will offer such great benefits that other bloggers will want to link to your post to help their readers.

News

Most new linkbaiters should really start off with trying to break the latest news in their niche before anybody else. Done right this is an easy way to build links from authority sites and social bookmarking sites. You should also benefit from lots of new RSS subscribers who want to get more breaking news from you in the future. Gain a reputation for being the first to break the news and you will dominate your niche. If you break a big enough story you will find all the bloggers in your niche desperate to post about it and links will flow into the hundreds or thousands.

Apart from being the first to write about it the key aspect of writing a breaking news article is to make sure the article is of exceptional quality and includes the sort of images that other bloggers will want to use on their sites. You need to make sure that your article is the authority that others will want to link to. If somebody else explains the story better or has more details then they will attract the links.

Finding news to write about can be very hard. Building relationships with larger companies is impossible for most bloggers so you will be reliant on subscribing to press releases and news feeds in most cases.

If you can be the second site to write about something and promote it in the right way you can often overtake the first site and become the “source” yourself. The best way to find breaking stories that have not yet become mainstream is to subscribe to a load of RSS aggregator feeds. Below are some of my favourites:

Tools

For anybody with a bit of imagination and a talented programmer, creating a tool for your site is the easiest way to link bait. Make the tool useful and well presented and its very easy to link to. Unique and useful tools can often turn a commercial site that struggles to attract any natural links into a useful resource that even competitors will link to and use on a regular basis.

Common ideas include methods to help people find information about products, test their websites, improve their skills, generate images or content for blogs and social networking profiles. Some of the best tools build millions of links without the users even knowing they are part of some clever link bait scheme.

As with any type of link bait the presentation of the tool is very important. Although it sounds like a cliché making good use of AJAX is a great way to improve the linkability of your tool.

Get sued or sue somebody

This technique is only recommended for those with deep pockets or a postal address in an obscure country where you are unlikely to ever face court.

If you decide to take on an industry giant like Google then the links will flow nice and fast. Make sure you have a good case to maximise your links.

Presenting your link bait

Although successful link bait will attract thousands of visitors you should not expect the visitors to click on any Adsense adverts or buy any products from your site. The best way to make your site stand out and attract links is to remove all the adverts. Yes, you read that part right. Remove your adverts. You can put them back on in a months time if you like but make sure the page is clean, well laid out, easy to read and ad free.

The next part is very important, you need to have a selection of bookmark buttons at the bottom of your page. Use the icons from each site to form the buttons so they are familiar to your visitors. The goal is for readers arriving from sites like Digg and Stumble Upon to like your site and bookmark it at Del.icio.us and Reddit while they are visiting.

Design is another essential skill in a link baiters arsenal. The page needs to look great and not look like just another Wordpress blog. Invest the time and money required to make your site look great. People who go the extra mile and design custom graphic for a particular article or blog post will get more links because of it. If you are really creative then adding an image that’s cool enough for other bloggers to use it on their blogs while they link to you will make you more memorable and maximise the potential of your link bait.

Next week: Promoting your link bait

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.

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{ 102 comments… read them below or add one }

Meads 29 Jun 2007 at 10:16 am

Great article, really looking forward to next week’s article.

Keyboardhustler 29 Jun 2007 at 2:34 pm

Awsome, thanks a lot! Im also looking forward to next week\’s article! Smile

Ash 29 Jun 2007 at 3:02 pm

Keep it up, another great post Smile

Root 29 Jun 2007 at 3:05 pm

Nice article, waiting for next week’s article ;)

Tulip 30 Jun 2007 at 6:37 pm

Thanks for such useful info , It would be better if you could explain tools used in link baiting !

Thanks
Tulip

AffiliateSeeking 02 Jul 2007 at 3:41 pm

Wow, what an article. I had actually looked into doing something very useful on my site and never got round to doing it, but after reading the article I now realize that I think it would have been a link bait. I didn’t know this at the time, but come to think of it now, it would have got quite a few other sites linking to it, especially in the forums. I am definitely going to look into doing some tools on my site.

Thanks for this great article and inspiration.

Ren 02 Jul 2007 at 5:46 pm

great tips. thanks!

wengchun 02 Jul 2007 at 8:12 pm

Awesome read…looking forward to the next one.

thanx

Andrew 03 Jul 2007 at 1:17 pm

Great tips

Vicky! 04 Jul 2007 at 6:41 am

Very nice.

I am pretty sure this is another linkbait article :p

Deca 05 Jul 2007 at 10:47 am

Thanks for your nice article Smile

Fable 06 Jul 2007 at 10:11 am

Very nice article. There’s definitely some unique ideas for link-baiting stashed away in there; I personally never would have thought of the whole ’suing for link-bait’ idea. Pure genius! ;)

Karla 06 Jul 2007 at 1:21 pm

Design is another essential skill in a link baiters arsenal. The page needs to look great . . .

Um . . . will you be practicing what you’re preaching?

Jag 07 Jul 2007 at 11:50 am

not sure if this really works, but definately I guess it’s worth a try!

David 07 Jul 2007 at 6:14 pm

Great article… looking forward your next post!!

kumar 08 Jul 2007 at 11:18 am

Thanks for great article
keep it up

Razi 09 Jul 2007 at 5:08 pm

Great Tips. Thank You!

KPeBiz.com 10 Jul 2007 at 5:31 pm

Great articles. Thank you.

Brandon 11 Jul 2007 at 4:50 am

look forward to how to promote links Smile
Keep up the good work

seo backlinks analysis tools 12 Jul 2007 at 10:06 pm

Thanx for awesome article .This article is worth

mintinfo.biz 13 Jul 2007 at 4:33 am

great article. I will try it

Cheap SEO Service 14 Jul 2007 at 5:36 am

Great information !

Complete Seo Tool 14 Jul 2007 at 7:04 am

Thanks for such useful info , i couldnt stop my self to read whole article

Thanks
Tulip

Webee 14 Jul 2007 at 7:42 am

Great article for newbies like m

John Pachecus 16 Jul 2007 at 5:32 pm

Good tips.. thanks

Terry 17 Jul 2007 at 3:27 am

I like this:

Get sued or sue somebody Smile

Jane 17 Jul 2007 at 2:05 pm

it’s amazing when it comes to sue anyone, may work really but you have to have lready a lil popularity to catch everyone’s eyes.

I’ll use the tips and see what’s happenning.

Byron 17 Jul 2007 at 5:10 pm

Very nice mate, very good article. Hopefully i will be able to get this right too. Will keep updates with results…

Senor Von Swago 18 Jul 2007 at 8:05 am

Great article. Top Ten lists are a great link bait as long as they are new. If it isn’t fresh it won’t get links, simple as that.

lowster11 25 Jul 2007 at 2:06 am

Great article. Keep up the great work!!

George Manlangit 30 Jul 2007 at 9:06 pm

“The best way to make your site stand out and attract links is to remove all the adverts.”

OUCHHHH! I’m guilty of this. I have been rethinking this and actually have started to tone down on most of my sites.

uttoransen 06 Aug 2007 at 6:13 am

thanks for your great tips!
am planning to implement some of them, cheers!

Promoinnovations.com 07 Aug 2007 at 9:17 pm

I would just like you to know that I think this article was awesome.

I kind of disagree with you on the top 10 lists, however. You can write 10 times the amount of top 10 lists in the time you can write a well written article.

Therefore, you have more of a chance of one of your top 10 lists hitting high “linkbait” status.

Buddha 19 Aug 2007 at 6:31 pm

great tips. thanks!

Dez Blanchfield 27 Aug 2007 at 1:36 pm

Interesting post, got me thinking about the topic, thanks!

For my money though, I have to say that I’m really very much over the deluge of bloogy useless posts about nothing that seem to be the norm in most of the mini-blogging sites you mentioned (and others).

I think if someone goes to the effort of actually authoring an average (i.e. 150 words or more) sized post, they make some small effort to make it worth the time they take to edit and post it.

The new trend of just posting links or images or any other quick post crap that takes the fancy of the “mini blogger” is just filling the web up with yet more useless crap that we’re already over loaded with ;-(

Sorry, but honestly, we can throw out the junk tabloids we get in the post box each week full of paid advertising and house listings and they are gone for good to be recylced as pulp paper, but the bloogy internet stores this crap for ever and ever and we end up with more and more of it in search engine results and the value of what we can find and read in time is increasingly diluted

Cheers,

Dez

jbrock 29 Aug 2007 at 10:47 pm

everything sounds great but I wish that you posted some examples.

fel3232 04 Sep 2007 at 2:58 pm

Great info, Thanks a million
http://www.livesteaua.com and
http://www.xivio.com

Matt Arnold 04 Sep 2007 at 3:06 pm

This is a great blog entry. Thanks for the info!

I’ve recently setup my first blog so I will definately be in need of some great linkbait to get it off the ground.

Maybe I should remove my ads until I start getting a decent PR or memberbase?

Cybernautix 05 Sep 2007 at 9:29 am

Very interesting. The real question and is probably left to the imagination is “what to do”.

Your overall view of link bait is great.

ogaden 12 Sep 2007 at 1:52 pm

thanks for your great tips!
am planning to implement some of them, cheers!

Insane Seb 17 Sep 2007 at 12:21 am

Another great way to attract new readers is by offering software (goes into your Tools category I think) like the one I’m offering. I got the rights to give away a great piece of software called Ezine Machine V.1 — just check out and get it for yourself.

thanks and great blog.. i subscribed Smile

Insane Seb

Work At Home Opportunities 09 Oct 2007 at 8:49 pm

Great linkbait article, great tips.
Thanks

Tony 15 Oct 2007 at 5:06 am

Great article

Thanks

John 18 Oct 2007 at 4:07 pm

Didn’t know this was called linkbaiting, but I have a few new ideas after reading your article. Thanks!

felix 07 Nov 2007 at 7:00 pm

Great info, but I only wish you explained a little more on the linkbait.

s_jenkins 14 Nov 2007 at 7:57 am

great article! do you think that ‘baiting’ is a gives the term ‘linkbaiting’ a bad precedence? it seems that some people think that ‘linkbaiting’ automatically means a trap of sorts. in the same breath, does google penalise for the term ‘linkbait’?

cziv 30 Nov 2007 at 6:29 pm

Great information to get things started. I will be trying all of those …

Thanks

http://www.ciaovenezia.eu

Palcomweb 07 Dec 2007 at 10:50 am

Link baiting is a new and progressive method of increasing link popularity.
You can easily create quality content on Link Bait .once it is online people will come to know about your views and wouls automatically link to it. It is more or less anything you create anywhere on the Web that inspires other people to link to it.
Link baiting involves a list of 6 hooks thar are generally known as
News
contrary
attack
resource
humor
fear

are the hooks every avid link baiter must master.

The above given points are very useful but it involves a lot of hard workwriting high quality content and proper popluarity.palcomonline is a web design development and hosting company based in noidawe provide expert seo services.
palcomonline.com

HealthInsurance 09 Dec 2007 at 9:28 pm

That makes total sense. I did not even know what link baiting was. I think I have read somewhere that is not liked by Google. Now I am thinking what can I implement on my website. Great blog thanks for sharing on Digitalpoint

Abiquddoos 10 Dec 2007 at 5:38 am

Hi,
I am new to this wonderful idea. I liked it and will try best to apply it on my new search engine optimization blog.
I hope it can work for me as after gaining some post up on the blog, will be interested in linkbait school signup to further increase my knowledge of link baiting!

seojig 10 Dec 2007 at 7:13 am

really great information about link baiting. i like the most important part from this article is to publish unique news.i think this is the best way to get more and more links for your site.

Vishal Sharma on Startups, Technology Trends... 10 Dec 2007 at 11:23 am

Thanks for providing such a detailed article

Geraldine 14 Dec 2007 at 8:33 am

This is great. Thanks. :]

Nick 14 Dec 2007 at 11:20 am

Thanks a lot for the info

Dean 14 Dec 2007 at 7:03 pm

Very usefull & interesting post

Thanks so much

Jaxey 15 Dec 2007 at 6:49 pm

Good Article Smile .. Go On .

ideaman 16 Dec 2007 at 2:07 am

Wow… I learn something new about linkbaiting.

Thanks for the good article.

Leandro 17 Dec 2007 at 1:58 am

Great article! thanks a lot…

Gene 19 Dec 2007 at 10:19 am

Very well written. Thanks for the article.

guru 01 Jan 2008 at 12:15 pm

the info was very useful , it would be more better if it also sited some examples of a linkbait

SMASHINGAPPS.COM 10 Jan 2008 at 11:35 pm

Great article. Thanks for sharing with us

Link Baiting Guide 05 Feb 2008 at 1:59 pm

thank you for the article.. i list the top 7 link baiting guides.

finding an honest webhost 11 Feb 2008 at 3:15 am

This article itself is a linkbait. I just bookmarked it in del.icio.us because I know I need this soon. Thanks for the great insight.

SEO Blogger 19 Feb 2008 at 11:25 pm

Thanks, Patrick! Very useful article!

niCEsHARE 11 Mar 2008 at 2:59 pm

Remove the Ads??? Apparently you don’t need to do this as long as you are neat with it – put them where it is not bugging your visitors. I prefer putting it at the bottom at the first start or the side, then move it to the top when you have enough ranks and loyal visitors. One more best way avoid pop-up at any cost ;)

Geekhall.net Admin 02 Apr 2008 at 11:33 pm

Great article, I think i might consider most of things You;ve said here and use it to incerase the populatiry of geekhall…

Alina 03 Apr 2008 at 4:22 pm

Interesting article. Maybe I’ll use some techniques…

shana 13 Apr 2008 at 6:23 am

good tips for newbies like me..thank you

SEO Company Leeds 24 May 2008 at 1:57 pm

An excellent post. There is some really useful tips that I will utilise..Cheers

Richard 31 May 2008 at 5:20 pm

Really good article, gave me a couple of ideas that I’ll try out.

Gregor Spowart 01 Jun 2008 at 9:38 am

Great post Patrick.

Most of the posts I read about baiting only give a broad idea of potential topics you might want to think about for link baiting. But you’ve gone a step further and presented a number of different types of linkbait.

Thanks,
Gregor

Simon Dance 18 Jun 2008 at 12:59 pm

Just read your ebook c/o Lyndon, and aside from keeping me up until the early hours of this morning, both this and the ebook are excellent.

Hats off Patrick… great stuff.

SEO Webmaster 14 Jul 2008 at 9:10 am

Thanks, Patrick! Very useful article!

Amol 21 Jul 2008 at 1:23 pm

I am visiting your site for the first time.You write the posts in a way newbies like me can understand..I have removed all the ads on my site :) It looks cleaner now.
Thanks for the tips…Great resource.

masterza 23 Sep 2008 at 4:42 pm

Very interesting article must all check and try, thank you!

jpmwhelan 10 Nov 2008 at 11:39 pm

Really interesting post. I appreciate your insights. I’ll have to reference this again from time to time.

chat room 25 Nov 2008 at 8:20 pm

really great information about link baiting. i like the most important part from this article is to publish unique news.i think this is the best way to get more and more links for your site.

Peter 28 Nov 2008 at 8:09 am

Hi, Excellent article. Adobe Acrobat Reader is my favourite as well. i am really looking forward for your next article. Thanks.

Toad Press 01 Feb 2009 at 2:57 am

lol@”Get sued or sue somebody”

Rimona 09 Feb 2009 at 12:38 am

Good afternoon. You have to have funny faces and words, you can’t just have words. It is a powerful thing, and I think that’s why it’s hard for people to imagine that women can do that, be that powerful.
I am from Saudi and know bad English, give true I wrote the following sentence: “Sarah sandori is the food and entertaining columnist for the solid gold info writers consortium.”

Thanks for the help :P , Rimona.

Burning 24 Feb 2009 at 8:08 am

great article ths

Keyword Research Tools 05 Mar 2009 at 7:37 pm

Link baiting has been used for several years now even by top blogger such as John Chow and Pro Blogger. I enjoyed reading and keep it up. Also read your story and how your blog backlinks and traffic exploded in such a little time.

Alex

Learn To Start An Internet Business 04 Apr 2009 at 5:14 am

Patrick,many thanks for another useful lesson from you ! Your blog is really an informative site to visit as it filled with many good articles !

Pic 10 Apr 2009 at 3:42 pm

it’s amazing when it comes to sue anyone, may work really but you have to have lready a lil popularity to catch everyone’s eyes.

:)

Murray Newlands 22 May 2009 at 1:35 pm

Great artical some more examples would be good.

Dimind seo blog 03 Jun 2009 at 12:02 pm

Very useful article! Thanks, Patrick!

felix 08 Oct 2009 at 5:22 pm

wow! Its indeed an interesting way of getting traffic. its just what we need… thanks

Photographic Backgrounds Colourscape 30 Oct 2009 at 10:54 pm

What a great article. Must give it a try myself sometime !!

zayıflama 26 Nov 2009 at 3:40 pm

What a great article. Must give it a try myself sometime !!

Source: Linkbait: Beginners Guide to Linkbaiting

Gidin 30 Nov 2009 at 2:09 pm

Good tips ;)

kravchik 11 Dec 2009 at 10:56 pm

Many thanks!

SEO Pro 28 Dec 2009 at 10:57 am

Great info for the start-ups. No wonder your blog has reached the level of success it has now. I have been successful with articles and top 10s in the past. You are right, you never know, sometimes they come when you don’t expect them. Which is always a good thing.

Maks 29 Dec 2009 at 1:52 pm

useful +1

Voyage Montreal 17 Jan 2010 at 5:42 pm

Wow, these are some great tips!

Thanks

Daz 18 Jan 2010 at 12:34 am

Hard to believe that you wrote this article 2½ years ago and it is still relevant, probably moreso today. Excellent content and advice. What do think to using software as a free digital download as linkbait? I know its not a web tool but can it be just as effective?

enozth 24 Jan 2010 at 8:05 am

Great tips ! i would like to say thank you.

bank 15 Feb 2010 at 10:49 am

Thanks, Patrick! Very useful article.

Necati- Internet Marketing Blog 28 Feb 2010 at 12:12 am

Linkbait is the act of adding content to a website with the aim of attracting links from other sites.

This definition seems too inclusive to me. I am sure many people with the SEO-mindset almost always have that aim in mind -among others. And I don’t agree either when you say linkbaiting can be accidental. I think the term itself has a notion of “intention” in it.

To me, the publisher wishes for backlinks for every piece of content produced, but he is deliberately cooking something up when he designates content as linkbait.

English is my second language but I’d be terribly surprised if I were the only one thinking this way.

Artem 16 Apr 2010 at 7:35 pm

Great information to get things started.

Kim 08 May 2010 at 3:36 pm

Thanks for the info. I look forward to trying your ideas on my site for Tabletop Trees.

kiev 23 Jun 2010 at 10:58 am

I had trouble finding this information on the Internet!
Thank you for taking the time to post!

Euro Buy 31 Aug 2010 at 7:03 pm

Thanks i wanted to do my own link baiting and it is fairly easy, all you got to come up with is a title that ranks well in google keyword tool.

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