Linkbait and Switch

Linkbait: Content developed for the purpose of attracting a large number of inbound links for SEO purposes.

Bait & Switch: (from wikipedia) a form of fraud in which the fraudster lures in customers by advertising a good at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute good is.

One of the most common questions asked of SEO’s is how to get lots of high quality, 1-way inbound links without paying for them. This used to be a nightmare for search engine optimizers, as it ruled out probably the vast majority of link-acquiring methods (reciprocals, 3-ways, directories, text link advertisements, etc.) There is, however, a very effective method which is employed quite frequently to attract these types of links.

I call it Linkbait and Switch. Generally, the SEO industry leaves it at “Linkbait”. I will describe some of the key elements of good Linkbait below, but I do not believe that this is the end of a good link campaign. In the Linkbait and Switch method, you use linkbait to get links pointed toÂÂ insideÂÂ pagesÂÂ of your site, and then, as the novelty wears off, you find ways to convert those links into SEO value on the homepage or another page of your site.

What Makes Good Linkbait?

Function
There are a handful of commonly successful forms of Linkbait. The most prolific and desparately annoying (but still somehow damn effective) are top 10 lists. Somewhere encoded in the giant human genome is the David Letterman gene. This gene makes humans utterly susceptible to anything organized in groups of 10. It is a form of genetic hypnosis that forces people to read your linkbait and post about it in blogs, forums, and online communities. Actually, I think there is something to it that is more understandable which we will discuss in the “Style” section.

The second common type of linkbait is a tool. These frequent the SEO community (hell, I made one two weeks ago on domain evaluation that got me a nice backlink from SEOBook.com, thanx!) because creating a useful tool simply requires basic PHP skills and a knowledge of what the community wants and needs. This, however, becomes more difficult when you start dealing with companies whose clients have nothing to do with the web and rarely post to blogs. There are always solutions, though. A local dealership could write (have a programmer write, that is) a tool that grabs real-time prices from used-car superstores to let people know what their car is “really worth”. A grocery store could write a tool that finds recipes from top recipe sites based on ingredients (rather than using the limited resources at Google Base). There are tons of opportunities.

The third common type is a flame. These are stories that find some reason to hate something that pretty much everyone hates already. “Microsoft Sells Soul to Devil, EULA Indemnifies Microsoft”. These kinds of stories, especially on tech sites, tend to gather a lot of steam, but they need to have some value. If you are really gutsy, threaten a lawsuit. Kinderstart’s lawsuit grabbed them thousands of backlinks according to Yahoo (search Yahoo for linksite:kinderstart.com “google”). * I am not encouraging you to actually abuse the courts. Abuse of Process is illegal.

The remaining common type is the most boring, Organizers. This is all those “Firefox Extensions Every Developer Should Have” and SEOMoz’s Web 2.0 Reviews. These are boring, but very effective. Take some time and do the searching for people. Do the research for people. Put it in one spot and blog it, digg it, del.icio.us it, reddit it, and anything else you can think of. If it is useful, people will come.

Form
Stylistically, there are a few items that make linkbait seem to work better. The first is brevity. This will, of course, destroy the article I am writing now, but I would rather be accurate in this case. Articles lose their usefulness if the reader must dedicate more time than it is worth to reading it. Think of it in real-time terms. If your user makes $15/hour and needs 10 minutes to read it, do you think they would spend $2 on your article at the local bookstore? This is what makes Top 10 Lists so effective. When someone reads “Top 10” in a title, they know that attempting to read the story will only require a minimal amount of their time. Moreover, once they begin reading, they can gauge how much more they have to read without scrolling to the bottom. The Top 10 list is almost like an open standard for writing with which everyone is comfortable.

The second style that should be applied is scanability. Use bullets, short lists, etc. to make the article easy to scan. Use distinguishing colors, bold type-faces, etc. on headers and keywords so that users can find the exact target for which they are looking and skip over that with which they are already familiar. If users do not have to engage the 80% of your information they already know to find the 20% they don’t know, they will be grateful. They will also remember that 20% because it took up 90% of the time they spent on your article.

The third style is data-light, image-heavy. Content that has great images that take no time to download are like heaven, especially if the article deserves good visuals. Before you release your linkbait, think if there are any good visuals to go along with it (screenshots of websites, pictures of gadgets, icons, etc). Take a good bit of time to make these as small as possible and consider storing them on a different server from your primary web-server to lower the burden on the server. You want the content to load very fast but the pictures to be available as well. Thumbnails are always good.

The final is 1-pager. The last thing you want is for the visitors to have to click through to multiple pages to find the right content. People hate hitting that next button, especially when they see no end. If you must, at least list out the Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next – so that they know what they are getting into. Using multiple pages destroys styles 1 and 2.

So I have Fried My Servers, Now What?

Once you have your linkbait launched and the links are coming in, how do you effectively make the switch? The first step is patience. You must wait until the hype and buzz have slowed down. People will start to get angry if the cool page they checked today is different from the one they just emailed to all of their friends. I give at least a month before I even consider making the switch.

Making the switch, however, is fairly easy.

First, copy your linkbait to another page on your site, perhaps /archive_linkbait.html. Then, add a permanent entry on the homepage of your site pointing to this new archived version. This is to keep people from getting pissed off for not finding the article anymore at the original location. Make sure that it is easily and accessible. People will forgive you if they can see and click on the article without having to dig through your site.

Second, use your good friend a 301 redirect. Using the 301 redirect, point the article, blog entry, whatever to the homepage of your site. This will, over time, transition the link juice to your home page rather than the internal page.

Conclusions
Linkbait and Switch is a fantastic way to attract both visitors and high-quality inbound links. Although you cannot necessarily get the anchor text you are looking for, you can’t buy a better set of links than those that come naturally (even though you solicited them unnaturally).

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