Well, it all started with USA Today publishing an article on SEO which was so poorly written that it didn’t stand any criticism – and of course people in the SEO community picked on it and posted about it and certainly linked to it – Aaron Wall posted about it on Threadwatch, Lee Odden posted about it on his blog, as many others probably did (heck I’d rather link to these fine folks than to that shitty article – and I’ll explain here why). Well, shitty it may be, but look how it got a pack of quality links in a matter of hours? Roughly speaking, now if Google picks up all these links and people then search for SEO-related stuff what they will see is an article linked ot by many SEO authorities – ahha thinks Google, this is probably a good candidate for top rankings for SEO-related stuff! And unsuspecting searchers looking for SEO information end up going to an article which contans a lot of misconcepts instead of valuable SEO information…
I even had a little discussion with Lee in his post’s comments stating my point that linking in abundance to something like that can’t be a good thing – but what could he really do? A link was appropriate when talking about this exceptional product of incompetence – so he linked, and so did others. I wonder if it all means that if I get on my computer tomorrow and write up and article about some industry I don’t know anything about I would get a ton of links form the top sites in that industry? Hmm, interesting… but as long as search engines cannot consider properly the context of links, a link is a link is a link.
So the lessons we have to learn from this little story are:
- Even those who know nothing about SEO can create a powerful linkbait;
- The real good linkbait is irresistable – love it or hate it, but you will end up linking to it.