Search engine optimisation from Blogstorm

The value of linkbait

by Patrick Altoft on May 22, 2008

Building as many natural links as possible is the key to getting good rankings in Google. We call it a linkbuilding machine but to others it’s just called publishing.

Let’s say you wanted to rank highly for some of the insurance search terms. Most guesses would say that to have a chance you need 24 months and 100,000 natural links. The value of a naturally ranking site is at least £1 million (perhaps more).

If a linkbaiter charges £1000 per article with 5 such articles per month then it will cost £60,000 a year to build links. If each linkbait gains 1000 links then after 2 years you have spent £120,000 and have 120,000 natural links and a site that’s worth £1 million.

In the UK there are perhaps 5 people that offer high end corporate linkbait services designed to build a lot of links over a long term period. The reason there are only about 5 isn’t just because it’s so hard but because the demand isn’t high enough to support too many more.

The reason for this is simple. For the past 3 years large SEO companies have been taking on very big clients and immediately buying as many links as possible. These companies then go to the top of Google and everybody is happy. It is much easier for the SEO company to buy 50,000 links for £20,000 than to spend time and money trying to learn about creating the links naturally.

Some of these large SEO companies are now struggling to deliver results for clients using paid links, directory submissions and on-site SEO and their clients are leaving, one by one.

In 12 months time the fees that UK linkbait experts charge will be five times higher than at present as demand will far outstrip supply.

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{ 1 trackback }

Content and Links are the Bread and Butter of SEO
05.27.08 at 11:01 am

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Evil Linkbaiter 22/05/2008 at 11:01 am

Get your linkbait whilst it’s going cheap. If you understand the benefits of compound interest you will understand the long term benefits of having magnetic content on your site.

A lot of seo types who don’t/can’t do linkbait are very vocal about how rubbish linkbait is. I wonder why? ;)

2 Kenneth Dreyer 22/05/2008 at 3:16 pm

So in other words you better start building your link network today!

3 Craig Dewe 02/06/2008 at 4:53 pm

It also means that this is a worthwhile skill to develop and the job title of Attention Seeker could be a more common in the future.

Remember when the SEO industry didn’t exist? The market is similar for link baiting experts right now.

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