Is Linkbait Good or Bad? - Brand Building vs. Linkbait

Wall believes that brand building is an approach that is far superior to using linkbait. He acknowledges that it is slower and more expensive than using linkbait, but it offers you some very significant advantages:

• If your brand is the keyword, search engines can’t devalue it as they can devalue linkbait.
  
• If your brand is the keyword, search engines have to show you at or near the top of the SERPs, or they degrade the user experience – and risk having users go elsewhere because they’re not finding what they’re looking for.
  
• Brand building gives your link growth a smooth, natural curve, which helps you rank better for generic phrases and gives the search engines no “spike” of links to target.
  
• Search engines can’t penalize a company for creating a real brand.

Those are all excellent points. From where I’m sitting, however, I don’t see why you can’t engage in both linkbaiting and brand building – indeed, why you can’t use one to help the other. Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” is still one of the classic examples of linkbait; it also helped to build the company’s brand.

About two years ago, Matt Cutts talked about linkbait in his blog, in a post titled “SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting.” He didn’t see it as a bad thing then, and apparently hasn’t changed his opinion. He even gave some great examples. But he was very clear on the point that good linkbait typically requires “sweat-of-the-brow work” or being creative. In one of Cutt’s examples, Danny Sullivan came in for some kudos for checking the spam filtering accuracy of SpamCop, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail – not just once, but three times. “Now Danny doesn’t need any more links than he already has,” Cutts observed, “but it’s producing info-laden content that makes a site or blog well-known over time.”

And that brings me back to the point I made earlier. Linkbait is not some magic pill or panacea; it’s simply content. Or as Cutts put it, “content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful ‘bait’ for links…And generating information or ideas that people talk about is a surefire way to generate links.” Approach linkbait with some of the same attitude that you approach content – that is, that you’ll have to keep producing it in order for your visitors and the search engines to keep coming around – and you’re likely to see a more natural rise in your traffic.