Johannes Beus
Some intelligent person ported the idea of Linkbaiting to Europe. The idea behind Linkbaiting is to generate a large number of new, incoming links to your own site by using uncommon or extraordinary content. Last year I already linked to a few linkbaits that I found to be well done and explained them. The beauty of a perfect linkbait is that costs are low – all you really need is creativity and that is where many seem to come up against their personal boundaries. Sadly, in recent times I get to see an increasing number of copycats in my feedreader and in the so-called blogosphere. There, someone – one of those participating of course, who naturally have to set a link or trackback first – will be able to win “EDU-links” (which seems to come close to the attraction of the Holy Grail to SEO-novices) or the well known, inferior Apple-hardware. At the moment, the big thing are “blog-censuses” where the initiator should be linked to, of course – needless to say that this is only for the good of all participants and without any hidden-marketing-agenda. And after all, let us not forget that such a census has once before given us a savior, which should make the participation and the link self-evident ...
In short: the standards for Linkbaits is falling. Please take more time and a considerable extra in creativity when developing such ideas. An idea that has been chewed up by blogs for the tenth time is no fun anymore. Of course, this may not be quite so easy to do and it will take its time – but you can be sure that it will be rewarded.