Like many things on the internet, link baiting follows the “what’s old is new again” pattern but with a slight twist of emphasis. Normally every page on your site should be created with a few things in mind. Things to take into consideration when creating a page on your site include the quality of the page, uniqueness of content, how it will be of interest to a visitor, and how it will convert them to a sale, sign up, etc. With link baiting the twist is that you are often actively trying to create something that goes beyond the normal web content considerations in order to hook your customers into spreading the word about your product in real life or online. When you hook them into the page and they find it useful enough, funny enough, controversial enough, etc. to share it with friends and visitors of message boards, forums, emails, MySpace, or any where else – you’ve probably created ‘link bait’ at some point in the past and not even know that you had. While there are an unlimited number of variations and types of link bait, below you’ll find a few examples that may help you to further understand this concept both in how it related to the web and examples of it’s use in traditional advertising mediums like TV, movies, and so on.

1) Link Bait that Co-Opts The Popularity of Others

During SES San Jose I had attended a session called “Link Baiting & Viral Search Success” where the classic example of the site: http://eepybird.com/ was brought up. This site, takes diet Coke and Mentos candy to create interesting geysers of soda.

While the site was originally set up just to have some fun and share an experiment, the videos of their experiments have been extremely popular and seen on most video sharing sites, on the news, shared in office emails, and more. Banking on this, the Mentos candy company decided to get involved with this site and embrace the buzz that was created by Eepybird. They’ve given Eepybird more candy for their experiments as well as highlighting the Eepybird videos on the official Mentos site: http://us.mentos.com/ Today there is even an official Mentos/YouTube contest. All of this has helped Mentos to move more candy and has created a ton of free publicity. While links from humor websites were to be expected, the appeal of these videos has caused major publications like the Wall Street Journal, the NPR web site and other highly sought after sites to review and link to both Eepybird and Mentos, links that they would have been hard pressed to obtain in any other way.

Similarly in real life, you may have seen this rock music/Christmas lights video as it made the rounds last year not only online but also on the news, most morning TV shows, and other places. Miller beer subsequently partnered with the house owner to create their own commercial based on the light show. This was likely done with the hope that they could associate themselves with this fun, interesting, some what buzz worthy video and obtain a bit of the good will and interest that the video had obtained on and off line.

Both of these are examples of companies creating link bait opportunities online and in TV commercials to get people excited about a product by banking on someone else’s work and get the “Hey did you happen to see that one video…” conversation started.

2) Unintentional Link Bait?

During this time of year, retail sites often start gearing up their seasonal related pages. Some have already created pages that may serve as year round destinations for searches on Mother’s Day, Valentines, and other holidays. The problem with creating pages now, for pages that you want to have ranked in a few months… often centers on links.

The consensus is generally that quality links from other sites that point to a page on your site are more worth while over a raw quantity of links that point to your page. But what exactly is quality and how are links measured? Engines can take numerous criteria into account to be sure, but links that seem natural, that exist over time (i.e. not just temporarily purchased text links), links that come from a wide variety of popular and semi-popular sites tend to help a site. What if you could gain links from sites big and small, ultra related and semi-related months before you actually have something available to sell to a customer thus helping to position your site? Seems like an unobtainable dream right?

As the holiday shopping season approaches, companies like Apple and Microsoft are announcing their new MP3 players. Whether intentionally ‘link baiting’ or not, Walmart had created a page with a product description and pricing for the newly announced ‘Zune’ player even though Microsoft has yet to announce any official pricing or suggested retail pricing. In turn, despite a clarification by a Walmart spokes person, the mere fact that they were one of the first retailers to place information online that including a potential price for the zune player… has gained the company, it’s web site, and particularly the page that will soon feature the Zune for sale, a ton of buzz – including many links. During the holiday shopping season, this will likely help this online store to kick start their rankings for their Zune related web pages since their competition’s Zune pages will still be new and struggling to gain links from ‘zune’ related sites come the holiday season. For the new pages, this works against the quality model that some engines use to examine the age of a link, and apply the tried and true ‘aged’ links as a ranking booster.

3) Negative Link Baiting

Not all link baiting attempts are positive and effervescent like a Mentos geyser. A maxim often associated with the eccentric 1800’s Circus owner and showman PT Barnum is: “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right”. And some link bait attempts begin with this in mind.

Arguably one of the most well known flash memory makers and one of the top sellers of MP3 players, is Sandisk. Several months ago, it had released a marketing campaign that essentially called iPod users “iSheep” among other things. They had created a new domain called http://www.idont.com, inflammatory cartoons, a blog, and other marketing collateral in an effort to goad people into talking about the differences in MP3 players and subsequently sell their Sansa MP3 players to those looking for an alternative to the iPod phenomena. It created buzz both positive and negative and in the end, Sandisk decided to create yet another site that was more tame, less challenging, albeit cute, but would probably create less buzz by focusing directly on their product.

Before you jump on either side of the ‘which is better, Apple or Sandisk MP3 players’ debate, remember that I said earlier “what’s old is new again”? Despite the backlash that ensued from iPod users against Sandisk’s iDont campaign, Apple is no stranger to negative campaigning. You may have seen their recent “Hi I’m a PC, I’m A Mac” commercials that satirize Windows problems. Years ago, Mac created a commercial reminiscent to the book 1984. This commercial sought to tell people to ‘break free’ of their prisoner-like, current computers systems with the ‘new‘ Macintosh computer. This easily could have been an early example of ‘link bait’ for newspapers, TV news, etc. when discussing computers at the time. This commercial is still being discussed.

Again, negative sensationalizing can be used online or in TV commercials in order to create a buzz around a product, service, idea, or company. The response may determine whether the message is adjusted or changed. But obviously, with negative link baiting, online responses often move quicker than TV. Tread carefully if you decide to go this route.

4) Is it Link Bait or Is it Art?

Consider the case of ‘lonelygirl15‘ on video sharing site ‘YouTube‘. An actress posed as a video diary posting teen. She sparked a considerably large cult following that hung on her every post. On YouTube you can post both video and text replies on each video posting. As Lonelygirl15 posting video about her ‘religion’, ‘boyfriend’, ‘parents’, and the like, many people opened up to her. It turns out that it may have simply been a marketing gimmick or experiment to promote the actress, a web site, or something similar which has yet to be completely defined. Because of this, a backlash has developed among fans and parents of fans. Some feel ‘tricked’. Some sites speculate that this might have been an attempt to tie in to a movie, web only video series, TV show, or similar but the chances that “lonelygirl15″ could be turned into something profitable seem fairly low with out some type of damage control at this point.

Perhaps they were trying to re-create some of the success that followed the launch of the web site and subsequent buzz around the movie “The Blair Witch Project“. If you can remember back about seven years ago, the producers of Blair Witch had created an online website that purported to document the “real” disappearance of three film students who went to investigate the folklore around a “blair witch cult” in Blair Township, Maryland. This movie was able to hook into it’s audience because it was not the stereotypical website with basic info on the cast/crew, basic story line, etc. It was a site that took a unique approach that today, doesn’t seem that unique. They treated the story as if it were real. The website, press releases, ‘missing’ posters at film festivals, and other marketing actions all sought realism, but were low key, and pushed the Blair Witch into almost urban legend status over the course of a few months. Even some sites like the Internet Movie Database had at one point reported that the film’s actors had died which led some to think that the film might have been more than a mere horror film after all. By doing something original with their website and marketing, it was able to make more than $200,000,000 on a film that cost about $60,000 to make. Opening weekend gained the film about $29,207,381. By contrast, “Star Wars – The Phantom Menace” came out a few months earlier but despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV commercials, die hard fans who had been waiting years for the movie, tie-ins at fast food restaurants (yay, my Taco Bell cup may be worth $10 now), action figures, a huge marketing budget, etc. it was only able to bring in twice the revenue of the Blair Witch Project on opening weekend, about $64,820,970.

Like negative link bait, art-like link bait is very tricky. If you alienate your fan base, then the popularity, links, and other aspects can come crashing down. If you do it right, you can earn great rewards with less effort.

Is Link Baiting a Legitimate Process?

Overall, link baiting is done so that people start to talk about your product, service, or other concept on the web or off line. Ideally the ‘bait’ causes others to link to it not just because the content is interesting, it can be factual, etc. but because it takes a few steps beyond the normal. There are potential risks as not all link bait works but great rewards if your link bait activity works out. It is not a new concept, but creating a little sensationalism, through “link baiting”, does seem to be fairly popular right now and it is probably not a bad thing to try according to Googler Matt Cutts.

Speaking of Mr. Cutts, link bait can be a semi-entertaining SEO song, a description of a company’s process using candy, a paper doll, or just about anything else.

Link Bait Conclusion

Link bait can be just about anything: a link gaining tips page, a new spin on advertising, funny cartoons about an industry, crop circle pictures, (with permission of course), movie spoofs, or just about anything else that think of. Appeal to your audience in a new way, beyond boring brochures, product descriptions, and sales by wrote presentations. Figure out how to tie in to your potential audience’s interests and adjust your presentation as needed.

Web site managers are of course interested in ensuring that their site is positioned well in the major search engines. It makes good sense to use any tools available to help achieve this goal. Last month, I discussed the Yahoo! Site Explorer tools that help webmasters obtain information about how their site is indexed in Yahoo!. Recently, Google has made a similar set of tools available to webmasters to assist them in getting their content indexed by Google.

The first thing to make note of when visiting Google’s Webmaster Central is the information available from three valuable sources.

• A Webmaster Blog has been launched, which contains official news and tips related to indexing and crawling web site content. It’s a good idea for webmasters to review the content of the blog on a regular basis for useful information. For example, a recent post by Matt Cutts provides tips on how to verify that a web spider labelled as Googlebot is authentic. 

   

• In addition to the Webmaster Blog, a Google Webmaster Help news group has been created. This is essentially a community of webmasters who post on issues related to Google, and sometimes converse with helpful Google employees. You’ll find a good deal of information there and if you sign up to be a member of the group, you can then post questions to be answered by members of the community. 

   

• A third information resource is the updated Webmaster Help Center which contains the answers to many frequently asked questions. It’s probably best to look for answers to questions at the Help Center first, then the Webmaster Blog, and finally the Webmaster Google Group.

In the past, I have written about the Google Sitemaps program. Google Sitemaps has now been renamed to Google Webmaster Tools, and contains the same features as the Sitemaps program, as well as some new additions. The Webmaster Tools are quite useful, and provide an informative snapshot into the way Google views a web site. In order to make the best use of these tools, you’ll first need to create a Google account (it’s free) and then verify that you are the site owner. One easy way to verify your site is to simply upload a file with a given file name to your site’s root directory.

Once you have verified the site, you’ll have access to detailed information about it, organized into three categories: Diagnostic, Statistics, and Sitemaps.

• Under the Diagnostic category, you’ll find a summary which lets you know if you have pages indexed by Google, and what date the Googlebot last visited the site. There is also a list of URLs that the Googlebot had difficulty crawling, an analysis of your robots.txt file, and an area to specify your preferred domain.
• The Statistics area provides interesting information about searches done on Google related to your site. The top search queries for which Google returned pages from your site are displayed, and these can be filtered by location as well as search type (images, mobile devices, or web search). The top search query clicks are also shown, which are the top queries that actually directed traffic to your web site. Additional information available includes the page rank distribution for your pages, common words Google found in your site content, and common words in external links to your site. 

   

• The Sitemaps area allows you to specify a sitemap page to explicitly let Google know the URLs on your site you wish to have indexed. There are several different formats that you can use, but the easiest one to create is probably a simple text file containing a list of URLs.

Conclusion
The new Google Webmaster tools provide an excellent glimpse into how Google views a web site. If you manage a web site, I highly recommend that you verify your site with Google and take a look at the information available. The tools are free and easy to use, so there is really no reason not to use them on a periodic basis to ensure that Google is indexing your site content without any difficulty.