Linkbaiting
The English language is a funny thing. It borrows words from the world over, such as hammock from the long-extinct Taino tribe in the Bahamas, wok from the Chinese, or otaku from the Japanese. And how about whole new words entering the language through communication on the internet? New words like blog and leet, which may or may not have gained dictionary acceptance, but are definitely widely known, acknowledged, and used by a global English-speaking audience. Consider a few other recent entries, like googling, blogosphere, or how about linkkbaiting?
Linkbaiting, in particular, caught my attention this week because it’s a term I had not yet heard of (but which makes sense in light of the SEO frenzy sweeping the web). It refers to creating web page material that invites backlinks — links from other websites to your page — and thus “baiting” other web users to promote your website via link connections. The reasoning behind this has to do with the back-end algorithm of Google’s pagerank system, which gives higher ranks (on a scale of 1 to 10) to websites with large numbers of links; operating on the assumption that such proliferations reflect subject relevance and information value on the page.
There are camps who eschew the idea of linkbaiting, calling it a blatant attempt to increase pagerank, while others say that the net effect of truly good linkbaiting is the exact same thing as having good SEO habits: creating pages with high quality content that people would want to link to. To me, both sides just sound like they’re arguing semantics, not core content.
But the fact that there are two sides of online marketeers debating the issue? Priceless. Not in the least because I suspect that the only reason they’re debating in the first place is to linkbait.