TIME magazine almost understands linkbait
Last Monday TIME magazine released an article titled “25 Sites We Can’t Live Without”. The article was, not surprisingly, widely read and linked from a lot of popular blogs as well as getting over 2500 diggs.
It might come as a surprise then that TIME has now removed the article from their website barely a week after releasing it. The page now redirects (badly) to the TIME homepage. Doing a Google search for the article title brings up an almost identical article from 2006 so clearly TIME has simply recycled old content for this latest version and had no intention of keeping the new one live.
Here is how they do the redirect:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.time.com">
It seems TIME needs to learn how to properly redirect a web page.
Linkbait is the art of creating a piece of content so good that lots of people want to link to it. TIME have clearly achieved this part but in removing the content after only a few days they haven’t maximised the number of links they can get and have damaged their credibility at the same time.
I will be removing the link from my blog as there doesn’t really seem much point in linking to the TIME homepage, they have quite enough links already.
Thanks to Tim from web design agency leeds for the tip!
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Haha, close but no cigar! Similar to an article I wrote a few days ago, maybe they read it?
Interesting. Although I can’t say I am suprised. I find it funny that TIME can write an article about the 25 Sites You Can’t Live Without, yet they don’t realize the value of other sites, and/or operation of sites.
sounds interesting.
Newbie question: How should they be redirecting?
Never thought that Time would ever recycle their content.