Link bait exposed

Did you see my story a few days ago about the kids with the dad’s credit cards and the hookers? Turns out, just as I suspected, that it was a fake story. It was a piece of link bait.

What is link bait you ask?

It’s a story, post or article that is created for the sole purposed of creating a link back to the originating site. But, not just any link, a keyword laden link. You see, Google uses how many incoming links a site has as one of its measures for a site’s popularity. The more links pointing to a site, the more popular, therefore the higher authority it has and the the higher it will turn up in search results.

That article, was some good link bait. I’m not saying that link bait is bad, but what I am saying is that when people figure out that they’ve been had, all of the links will disappear and you would’ve lost whatever credibility you had with the humans that link back to your now untrustworthy site.

The thing is, you want to create good quality articles that will create good quality links back to your site, but you want to do that with real, legitimate articles. Not useless articles that have been created for the sole purpose of generating incoming links to your site. Actually, come to think of it, it sort of sounds like what some of those automated article creation software packages do. They create a bunch of articles that are of low value to anyone. Maybe not.