Well you could spend your time searching out competitors, suppliers, customers and anyone else you can think of to link to you. Or you could write a press release and spend a couple hundred dollars to embed a few links in it.

Or you can take advantage of a technique which has circulated in the nether regions of the web - link baiting.

I know it sounds bad, but really it isn't.

Link baiting is a technique whereby you encourage people to link to you because of something found on your site. I think Performancing has the best descriptions of the different types of link baiting so let me summarize for you.

Essentially there are 5 types of link baiting, also known as hooks: News, contrary, attack, resource, and humour. Each has its pros and cons and each requires a different technique.

News hooks as the name implies is encouraging people to link to you via some news you have posted on your site. Ideally it's a scoop that no one else has, but it could also be a summary of different headlines in order to develop a complete picture about something, or you've uncovered proof that the reported news is wrong.

In each of these 3 examples, you are providing new content that no one else has but others will be eager to link to.

Contrary hooks are when you disagree with something posted or someone. For example, if I felt a prominent well known search engine marketer was way off base on something (which is sometimes the case I must admit J ) I would start my article by saying "(insert name here) was out to lunch when they said (insert bold statement here)"

This is a common tactic - one you see when someone in any industry tries to make an assertion such as 'there is no Google Sandbox.' There are going to be just as many proponents of this view as there are opponents. And it is usually the opponents that strike back - fast and furious. And of course, the article starts as I've mentioned above, with a link back to the original source.

Attack hooks take the contrary views to the next level. In it many times personal attacks are made in addition to the contradictions. One has to be careful when using such an attack, though because while it may garner even more links than a contrary hook, many of the links could likely bash you for the attack in the first place.

Resource hooks are more polite. They don't involve flaming anyone online or trashing their theories. Instead you build up your website as THE place to come for information on a topic.

For example, if I were to start a Google News blogs, then I'd be sure to fill it with information and links relating to Google. Then, that's all I'd post about - Google. That way when someone is looking for more information on the latest Google patent, or 'don't be evil' news headline they could come to my Google News site for supplementary information.

Finally are the Humour hooks. As the name implies, you use original humour to get your point across. You could use things like obscure or weird photos or news scraped from the web to become that source, or just post jokes online that people find funny and that they'd link to.

Of course, you could use any of these types of link baiting together or individually through multiple posts.

I know on various sites that I've used this on it works quite nicely. For example, I wrote an article a year ago about the Google Florida Update where I gave my opinion on what the update did for Google.

When it came out it got a lot of exposure from various sites. In fact this single page has 88 links to it from other industry related sites, including a listing for this article in the DMOZ directory.

As you can see, while the name sounds bad link building could be a very effective link building tactic which could take little effort. Much less effort than manually searching out and requesting links.


Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

Copyright 2005 - Enquiro Search Solutions.