Linkbait: attracting attention without appearing cheap
What Linkbait is, what formats work, and how to build linkable content with real utility.
The topic is especially important when rankings, trust or the evaluation of external signals are unclear. In practice, it is almost always worth looking at quality, context and risks instead of pure quantity values.
What Linkbait is, what formats work, and how to build linkable content with real utility. This wiki page arranges the topic practically and shows, When priority arises, which mistakes are often and how you derive concrete measures from them.
Example: A data table becomes really citable
They publish their own evaluation with time period, sample, definitions and a permanently achievable results table. Editorial offices can thus not only adopt an assertion, but also understand a concrete number and its limits.
The mere term “study” does not yet make a contribution worthy of citation. Schedule verifiable original data or a useful work tool and name restrictions. Whether external references arise also depends on relevance and dissemination; they cannot be promised.
What can a Linkbait consist of?
First of all, it must be content that matches the topics of other websites and therefore offers them added value. In terms of form, infographics, videos, whitepapers, e-books and generally high-quality blog posts are always suitable. In the entertainment and consumer sector, sweepstakes or competitions are also used. The content must be very informative or very entertaining. At the same time, the format can be very original. Both increase the likelihood of backlinks from other sites.
A good example was provided a few years ago by the buyer portal kaufda: It showed an infographic on real-time online consumption in Germany (who buys at what time of day what where for how much money). The graphics were dynamic, kaufda constantly collected data. At the same time, the display was limited to a few large areas (fashion, home electronics, food, sports, mobility, etc.) in order not to overload the graphics. This was an unusual, original and performant information that other traders liked to link to. The buyer portal kaufda gained valuable backlinks from strong partners.
The Importance of Linkbaiting
As part of OffPage SEO, linkbaiting is one of the more complex but valuable measures. The fact that backlinks are important is well known. Methods of Black hat SEO, especially the purchase of links, are prohibited and are punished by Google. Many optimizers generate backlinks through their own publications in press portals, their own blogs, forums and social media portals, which is allowed and costs a lot of work, but enables a planned implementation: The optimizer places a certain number of contributions with backlinks on its main page in the relevant portals, so it can achieve a certain number of backlinks in a certain period of time.
But the quality of these backlinks is not rated very high by Google. Especially backlinks from own blogs bring very little. For example, if you use the Google Blogger program and thus set backlinks from your own Google account to your main page, which is also logged into your own Google account, you will find that the effect is very small. Backlinks from completely different accounts bring more and more. However, there are not many wide-reaching press portals and forums with high trust. Google does not rate the backlinks from social media portals very high.
Linkbaiting, on the other hand, ensures in the best case for backlinks from foreign sites with high trust and high reach.
Procedure for Linkbaiting
First of all, content must be drafted. These should, of course, be linked to the company’s brand message, but this has no priority: The content must not look like clumsy advertising. Rather, attention must be paid to a high information and/or entertainment value. The optimizer must also consider the distribution potential of the content: How many partners can he offer his content? If he focuses on a special topic that is interesting for only a few other webmasters, he makes a lot of effort for a small result.
In addition, the editorial claims of possible interested parties must be observed. The optimizer must evaluate these interested parties in advance in order to arrive at a content concept at all. According to the content concept, the content is to be created, which can be commissioned by specialized agencies. The last step is seeding: The content must be offered to the partners together with the request for a backlink.
Possible interested parties react to this differently: Sometimes the positive reaction is in the single-digit percentage range, sometimes it is also 30 percent and more. Accordingly, the optimizer for the action needs a long list of potential interested parties in its content.
How does seeding work?
The simplest method of distribution (seeding) would be an offer by mail to the possible interested parties. Many other webmasters do not react to such offers because they are flooded by advertising mails. If you go this way, you need a short and concise subject line: “Interesting content for you: infographic to ...”. Some optimizers make the effort to call potential prospects and even discuss the content in detail with them in order to adapt it to the needs of that particular partner, if necessary. This is a very high effort for a (albeit strong) backlink. Whether it is worthwhile, the optimizer must decide in individual cases.