Is Linkbait Good or Bad? - Google’s View of Linkbait
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Don’t be misled here; I’m not actually quoting Google right now, though I’ll probably quote Matt Cutts later. I’m still talking about Wall, who points to a video in his post in which UK search marketer David Naylor expresses his belief that Google is going to begin devaluing linkbait. In the video, Naylor compares the natural growth in links to a web site, which he describes as a smooth upward curve, to what you see with linkbait – lots of spikes. Naylor thinks that Google will begin to look at the average number of links a site gets over set periods of time to judge its importance and position in the SERPs, rather than paying attention to these spikes. In short, if the spikes of links aren’t followed by “an increased baseline growth rate,” according to Wall, Google will begin to discount their value.
After noting that Google hand-edits particularly successful linkbait, Wall says that “A couple of my better friends who are a bit cynical went so far as stating that linkbait is only promoted by search engineers because it is so easy to detect and devalue.” This is what linkbait is supposed to have in common with reciprocal links pages. Are the engineers who build search engines really trying to steer us wrong in this way so they can better tune their systems?
Maybe I’m just lacking in the capacity for cynicism, but that seems unlikely. It’s important to point out that Wall’s post focused on “random one off linkbaits.” Additionally, the David Naylor video seemed to be looking at linkbait that was off-topic for the site or periodic special events. If it was all related to what the company was doing – say one piece of linkbait being a product launch, another one being some big news about the company, and so on – Naylor conceded that it might help increase the general baseline of the number of links a site receives, so Google probably wouldn’t entirely discount the spike of links a site gained from its linkbait.
Besides, the point of linkbait isn’t just ranking higher in Google thanks to all of those links you gained; it’s generating more traffic for the site. In a post on Marketing Pilgrim, Roderick Ioerger considers Wall’s points, but doesn’t find the idea that Google or any search engine might devalue a set of links gained from linkbait to be a compelling reason to avoid creating it. “Links that generate traffic, whether or not a search engine values them, in my mind are still good links,” he asserts.
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