Is Linkbait Good or Bad? - Vanishing Visitors

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Wall quickly points out that linkbait does “have many potential risks that are rarely discussed by most marketers.” Then he focuses on the transience of the kinds of visitors it attracts, saying that they “have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever.” If you're trying to build something more permanent, this isn’t the kind of audience you’re looking for, right?

Well, yes and no. The first thing to keep in mind is that good linkbait is content. Yes, you hear a lot about widgets being used as linkbait these days, but many of them simply provide a way for the user to receive content more easily (news, weather, blog posts, etc). Others provide ways for the user to share and/or manipulate data. So in that sense, we’re still talking about information, it’s just the form that has changed.

So those visitors come once for your linkbait and go away? Then make more linkbait. Keep producing stuff those visitors would find useful and interesting, and they’ll keep coming back. At the very least, when you attract them to your site with linkbait, make sure they can easily find more content and other things in which they might be interested. Granted, this may not be easy depending on the kind of linkbait you’re using, but nobody ever said that SEO was easy.

It almost makes me wonder if, by using a specialized term, some have forgotten that “linkbait” is simply a particular type of a much more general term: content. Yes, it’s content that’s designed and built a certain way, with certain very specific goals in mind, but that doesn’t take away the fact that it’s simply content. That means that the same rules that apply to other kinds of content apply to linkbait – to wit, if you don’t produce it regularly, the search engines will browse you less, and you’ll attract fewer visitors.

True, not every piece of content you add to your web site has to be linkbait. Google likes fresh content whether it’s linkbait or not. But it helps if you can do something regularly that will attract visitors to your site. If you keep attracting some of the same people for that “one visit, one pageview” repeatedly, they might actually bookmark your site and check back from time to time to see what you’re up to.

Next: Google’s View of Linkbait >>
 

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