Name the number one criticism of linkbait: from a technical point of view, the top problem with popular content is that it often doesn't attract many links. "Linkbait" has become a word we use to mean pretty much anything that gets media attention, no matter whether it is heavily linked to or not. In fact, one could argue that social media sites harm linkbait as much as they help it: if someone can say their piece about a subject within Reddit's comments or StumbleUpon's reviews, they may have less need to write about it on an external blog and link to the original source. Some social news sites nofollow their outbound links (StumbleUpon does this 100% of the time and Reddit appears to have a popularity algorithm that dictates when a nofollow is removed). Thus, forty reviews on StumbleUpon and many times more thumbs up mean nothing in terms of traditional, link-based SEO.
If blogging is a site's primary means of acquiring links, virtually anything it produces could be linkbait of some sort. However, the things you called linkbait when you set out to create them aren't necessarily what brought a site the most links. This is similar to the difference between viral marketing and content-based link building and I've been as guilty as anyone of calling something linkbait when it was actually publicity generation and eyeball-attraction. Ain't nothing wrong with content like that, either. In addition, if I worked for a search engine (err.. a search engine that indexed content as well as links), I'd be very interested in the net's collection of viral, linkless information.
StumbleUpon is a good place to go to find content that has passed before a high number of eyeballs but which is often lacking inlinks. Neither individual reviews pages nor popular items lists give away followed links, which I find pretty unacceptable: items receiving over a certain threshold of attention should at least be granted a followed link, especially as that content is what makes StumbleUpon worth using.
After a certain number of up-votes and reviews, the nofollow should be removed.
With the array of metrics available to calculate pages' strength, trust and success, it's becoming easier to figure out what sort of content creates visibility and which attracts links and whether it's worth keeping or scaling back the sort of Digg-topping efforts that result in few inlinks.
So far, Linkscape is confirming a lot of what we all suspected about gimmicky content as opposed to useful posts and projects. We already have very good ways to measure the visibility success of content: 2,500 Diggs, hundreds of Reddit up-mods and many thousands of StumbleUpon views confirm that a lot of people saw something. Social media isn't SEO, but it's the fish to SEO's chips and the value of exposure shouldn't be underestimated. However, what is the true SEO benefit of different forms of popular content?
Take a comparison of five pieces of SEOmoz content. The five pieces cover the popular-content spectrum rather nicely:
Gimmicky: Alternative Google OneBox Suggestions. This popular post received 2548 diggs and adds virtually nothing to the collective knowledge of the Internet. It seems that when we've been drinking, our efforts don't add much value to anything, after all.
On-topic; Light on content: Gorgeous Website Footers. Matt Inman's list of beautiful website footers is far more useful than the previous post. It received almost exactly half the number of diggs as the OneBox post.
The "OMG" Ticket: Google Automatically Removes URLs Ending in .0. This post rode the "what the hell" wave into popularity by uncovering a formerly-unknown (and now abandoned) Google practice of throwing URLs ending in .0 out of its index. Webmasters came away from this post with one piece of knowledge, but that one thing was interesting enough to bring in social media traffic and garner inlinks.
Actionable Advice: 17 New Rules for Successful E-Commerce Websites. Rand analysed high-performance e-commerce sites and provided easily-implemented, useful advice regarding their effective strategies.
Large-Scale Actionable Research: Google's Search Ranking Factors. I hardly need to explain why this is the most useful and least noisy type of content. Virtually countless pieces of advice and knowledge, great presentation and 100% on-topic information.
So how do these five different types of content perform when pitted against each other in an epic Linkscape battle?
I promise you I didn't plan that. The order of the URLs was based on how valuable I considered each piece of content, and the pages' metrics confirm that the Internet agrees. The only metrics that don't follow the pattern are the "URLs ending in .0" post, whose mozTrust is higher than Rand's e-commerce piece, and the fact that Matt Inman's footer post has more external links than the URLs article. Those anomolies are easily explained: the URLs post was linked to by more authoritative sources, mainly because it was only interesting to people like us. The footers post gained links from both some of the sites featured, people who'd worked with the footers' designers and regular design / SEO blogs.
What is the premier type of linkbait you see on the web? Of course, it's the gimmicky stuff. It often performs the best in social media, and thus we're fooled into thinking that it's the best form of link building. It isn't even true that this sort of content is the easiest to come up with! It usually takes true inspiration, a bit of wit and often a few martinis to be sufficiently funny to appeal to social media crowds en masse, but you're often providing them with little more than a cheap thrill. Done often and well enough (Hi, Cracked! RIP Drivl), this tactic develops an enviable following and link profile, but it rarely turns into massive numbers of links if done on a normal scale.
Yes, there are exceptions and we've seen them, but the daily offering atop StumbleUpon's most-popular list won't necessarily turn into the sort of link love that less exotic pages will eventually pull. Thought you knew this already? Most of us always assumed that this was true, but it's nice to watch the evidence pile up. Put your site's or your clients' linkbait through Linkscape (the above reports are free to run) and see which ones resulted in the highest degree of trust, inlinks and mozRank. A combination of high-quality, high-link items and high-attention pieces achieves both the social media and SEO benefits of link-worthy / viral content.
It probably means less time creating "fun" items, but the link benefit of understanding what produces the best linking results are surely worth it. Although I can't promise that we won't drink too much at a conference in the future and write something else that makes a lot of noise on Digg and garners us no links whatsoever ;)
Really interesting. Thought that I'd take your advice and compare a couple of things so I compared www.dothetest.co.uk (which was designed as viral marketing rather than linkbait) to www.tfl.gov.uk, the site we did it for.
Amazingly dothetest has just under 1/3 the links of TFL, despite the fact that it's not even a year old, and TFL is packed full of useful stuff (is there anyone in London who doesn't use it for finding out about the Tube?)
So, I think that we can add one more rule to your list:
Want links? Get a man in an animal suit dancing like Michael Jackson.
Simple
Ciaran,
That's bada** -- Link: watch out for cyclists
I think it does well as link bait because there's a legitimate message involved, rather than just something amusing to watch.
Sometimes the fish are the chips!
Awesome. What we've learned from this is that content just needs to be hilarious as well as useful and informative. Ok, I know.
Really, this is a relief to me as my company doesn't neccessarily have the time to sit around and develop social-media attracting linkbait, as fun as it would be. Developing useful and organized information, though, is our usual primary focus, particularly for our portal site.
I know that kind of buzz is useful, too, but if we have it on the backburner for a long while, I'll know our efforts are ultimately for the best. That good 'ol democratic nature of the web will stand by useful content.
Nice post, but I don't agree with you on StumbleUpon. You're missing a critical detail:
Pages on StumbleUpon.com are nofollow'd, but links in their RSS feeds aren't. There's a ton of Stumblers who use StumbleCrumble or similar plugins to show their recent links on their blogs, profiles, etc, and it pulls the (followed) links directly from RSS.
Furthermore, if you actually do reach the StumbleUpon buzz list you'll get a lot of followed links (I've hit it twice). Right off the bat you get popurls.com and its clones, all with followed links, and a fair number of blog links. I had one microsite on a brand new domain hit SU buzz and it ended up with a toolbar PR5 within 2 weeks.
There's a caveat for getting on the buzz list though: you have to submit to a topic thats included. I've gotten on it for submitting content to the politics and computers categories, but have had much more popular pieces never make it in more obscure categories.
Thanks for clarifying those points! I'd totally missed that. I'll definitely be looking into SU buzz.
I agree in the sense that you shouldn't go out of your way spending hours or days brainstorming a funny, digg-baity article that only attracts 50 links. At the same time, however, I still think that spontaneously created linkbait or creating something that will only require an hour or so of work to generate 50 links still means that you were able to build 50 links to your site in an hour, and that's pretty damn good.
Compare Jane's One Box Results post to Rand's Search Ranking Factors. The idea for her post came to her out of the blue in a bar at a conference, and she spent a short amount of time putting it together. According to Linkscape it earned 27 links (based on the pages Linkscape has crawled). Conversely, the Search Ranking Factors took months to put together and was a culmination of 37 SEOs and their expert opinions. The piece received 2,934 links.
Now, if Jane took months to come up with her One Box Results post and it only earned 30 links, that'd be pretty tragic. But the fact that she whipped it together quickly and it earned a small but decent number of links compared to the time invested is still a success, in my opinion. Thus, I think that the "success" of a particular linkbait launch is largely dependant on how much time was put into the piece and how many links/traffic it received. Using that as a means of measurement, I'd argue that both Jane and Rand's articles were a success. :)
Admittedly, it took us longer than it should have because typing and creating images was more difficult than normal :)
Haha, okay, I'll give you that...under normal circumstances, however, it wouldn't have taken very long. ;)
I should add that those URLs weren't picked for any other reason than that they covered the spectrum of social media-friendly content and Linkscape just happened to confirm their SEO-usefulness. That either proves that I'm excellent at social media strategy, that Linkscape is fantastic, or both. Take your pick ;)
(I'm kidding, please don't think I'm that much of a show off!)
I think this is a really good point you make Jane and appreciate the extra effort in tracking down some real stats to back it up as others have said.
It's also interesting to note while baiting with the social media crowd may not garner you many backlinks, if your goal is conversions/sign ups it can work pretty well.
Ask 0atmeal.
Good stuff again, thanks!
Yep, sites can get a lot of ot the combination of SEO and social media in the long run.
Nice work Jane.
You make a pretty good distinction in that you need to create content that is flashy enough that it can attract eyeballs (via your social media of choice), but for the longevity brought about by links the content needs to have something of deeper value.
You've just pointed out that writing great content is harder than it looks.
Gret Post.. Goodie
Excellent post Jane. Love that you've taken the time to gather all of the evidence to back this up.
I think there's definitely space for gimmicky stuff - there's a lot to be said for some light relief, and in some markets I'm sure works very successfully but we shouldn't lose sight of the importance of creating useful, high quality targeted content.
Yes, the humourous, light-weight stuff definitely has its place. I know that we've built a community not solely on Search Ranking Factors-type content, but on the fun posts as well.
Just to reiterate a point I don't think I made terribly well in the post, the high-visibility stuff is important as well, but it's not necessarily linkbait. The link building side of SEO and the promotion side of social media are siblings, not twins :)
Nice break down. Thanks Jane.
Just when I was thinking looking funny was finally going to pay off.
Damn.
Definitive content garners links. Wikipedia knows this.
It'll be interesting to see historical link data as you keep Linkscape up and running. You'll be able to see how those OMG pieces of viral spread across the net, and how much staying power they garner.
Only downside of going to SMX East - I missed this post. Just an awesome example of the power Linkscape is going to grant SEOs and link builders moving forward. Phenomenal metrics.
While some people have raised concerns about what Linkscape exposes to competitors, the bottom line is this: Linkscape is here, it provides valuable ways to measure links and linkjuice on the web (metrics we've never had before) and if you're afraid of your competitors using it to gain advanced knowledge on your linking campaigns, well...you'd better just suck it up and realize the bar is set higher now. This just debuted at the top of the "must have" list of SEO tools.
I love the social media is the fish to SEO's chips. I can't see you write fish and chips without hearing you say it. Gotta love the accent ;)
You can hear me say it in a few weeks... I can't wait for some British fish 'n chips ;)
Hi Jane, Thanks for writing this post, Im glad I came across it. Link bait can be one of the biggest brain teasers in SEO. This is a good factor to keep in mind when workin up new ideas.
I really think that speaks more to the fact that people typically looking for specific content on any given day but that doesnt mean anyone else is looking for that exact same content. however one thing everyone has incommon is they will stop and read a controversial material and even pass it on. That doesnt mean they want to link to it because it typically isnt a stronghold truth. Controversial = theory interesting to read, nothing to stake claim or to link too.
this post is great, it arrives just on time when we are in the middle of planning two linkbait campaigns at work, very useful insights, Jane, thanks + good tip about Stumbleupon, very naughtly! : )
Good post! I've had the suspision that getting on top of digg and stumble wouldn't necciserly mean that it would be a great linkbait campaign. Good to finally have some solid proffs of it!
Very interesting observation indeed.
Good Post.
A lot of linkbait going on for Linkscape here.