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Is Linkbaiting Ethical?

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Filed under: Link Campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation by Nick on November 12th, 2008 @ 10:42 am

The term linkbaiting, while sounding like an unethical Search Engine Optimisation practice, is not only considered ethical but could be considered to be the utmost in desirable practices for your website. In short, linkbaiting is the creation of content that will attract other website owners and publishers to offer a link to your site. This basically means any content that is of a high quality could be considered linkbaiting and the provision of high quality content will never be considered unethical by the search engines or by anybody else for that matter.

What Is Linkbaiting?

Linkbaiting is the creation and publication of extremely high quality content that is appealing to your visitors but is appealing enough that it will encourage other website owners to link to it thereby providing you with an SEO beneficial link in the process. It is so called because the provision of high quality content on your website pages baits websites into offering you a link and links are considered highly sought after because of the benefit they offer in Search Engine Optimisation marketing.

How Easy Is Linkbaiting?

While linkbaiting is theoretically simple, it can prove much more difficult than this in practice. The fact is that it can take a lot of effort and care to provide content of the kind of quality required to bait links from other sites. While textual based SEO content may prove effective in linkbaiting through blogs and other content based sites, many modern websites prefer to link to other forms of online media including video and online applications.

The Surf Through Benefits

As well as being beneficial to your Search Engine Optimisation campaign, content that is considered linkbait has its own organic benefits. Links from other websites that are offered freely and without request are usually given pride of place within the body of content on the linking page. These types of links are known to generate great quality surf through traffic because visitors are already wrapped up in the topic of your page and they also treat the link as being an indication of quality and trust from the linking page.

What Makes For Good Linkbait?

Many different types of content can be used as effective linkbait although obviously certain types of content will prove more effective than others. In terms of text based content, lists, guides, and whitepapers are definite linkbait. Video reviews and online applications could also be considered linkbait while anything humurous or funny will naturally attract links as long as there is traffic to see the content in the first place.

SEO Link Building

Link building a major component of an effective Search Engine Optimisation campaign and webmasters are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to generate links. Creating linkbait is one of the most desirable methods but it does require that the linkbait page has its own source of traffic otherwise nobody will see how high quality the content is and will therefore be unable to offer a link to that page. Linkbait also offers other benefits including surf through traffic from relevant pages.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 10:42 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed.

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Responses to “Is Linkbaiting Ethical?”

  1. Andrew Says:

    Indeed the link building is the opposite to the link building while in the link building we link to other sites at the same time back links to other sites.

  2. Daniel Says:

    Link baiting is good practice for attracting the high quality of back links and in my opinion this is not unethical and search engine algorithms too.

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