Why are we so afraid of Linkbait?
Occasionally I wonder whether we are own worst enemies in the SEO Industry, so I’m unsettled by one of the latest trends I’ve observed over the last couple of years (and increasingly in the last few months) – an irrational fear of anything that could possibly be linkbait.
It goes like this – somebody says something potentially controversial , we (as SEO’s) decide as a collective that we disagree with the author , everybody tweets about the post and people start typing their responses … and then somebody screams linkbait. We stop writing our responses, we don’t comment on the blog, we stop retweeting the link and we definitely don’t write a counter post citing it. The general thought is, because it might be a cunning linkbait ploy, we should all ignore it and let it go unchallenged. If we disagree with something, we definitely should make sure we do our part to bury it (or something like that).
The first thing I think we’re doing wrong is making the classic assumption that other people are like us – that they share our knowledge and motivations. I’d like to bet that the majority of people involved in publishing online don’t have a clue about linkbait. Maybe Techcrunch know about linkbait but the PCmag guy? Really? Even if he has heard of linkbait, I think our fear of being duped is likely greater than his desire to get our links.
But the problem is deeper than that – even when we know the other party might want the publicity should it stop us? Do we really let our fear of falling for linkbait override the need to put our side of the debate across? What if we really disagree with what was said? Is it OK to suffer ignorance as long as it doesn’t get found by others? A similar thought process is applied when justifying the decision to censor extreme political parties (better to let distasteful views go unchallenged than risk them even getting more attention). I don’t agree in either case.
Perhaps part of the problem lies in the word linkbait itself – when bait is used in fishing context, it’s being used as a way to fool the fish purely for the benefit of the fisherman – the fish is definitely not going to be having a good time if it takes the bait. What does a web publisher lose though from linking out? If anything we’re likely to gain from linking out to something that’s getting lots of other editorial links – and hopefully, if that post is ranking, your counter argument will be ranking alongside it.
Let’s think of it another way, if a BBC journalist contacted you about a white paper you published, and subsequently wrote an article informed by it, but didn’t link and then said “I can’t link to you …. I really disagree with what you say on page 2 and the last thing I want is to do is help you rank that… besides, you’re whitepaper is obviously a linkbait! I’m not falling for that” - surely you’d be up in arms? “Old media doesn’t get it”.
Let’s not fear linkbait even if we know its linkbait, and we don’t like the content. If the said linkbait provokes us to respond, then that’s what I think we ought to do – linking is beneficial to all of us and we all rely on it. We wouldn’t want people to not link to us just because they disagreed with us, would we? If that happened we might have to agree with everybody, and that, for sure, would suck.
A thought provoking post as usual there Matt, although as you know the LeedsSEO crew have no fear of sharing a few links out where we deem appropriate. In regards to the comparison tp extreme politics there is a line that has to be drawn between acknowledging something and engaging woth it for what it is (which I assume is what you’re driving at) and giving something undue credibility (as with the Nick Griffin on QT incident where no one seemed to be able to keep a level head).
I’m not sure this is such a problem for the audiences linkbait is aimed at however (as they are likely to be non seo) – the only people who bitch about it are the sniping SEOs who wish they’d thought of it first. And they aren’t the people you want links from anyway.
I don’t think that we’re necessarily fearful of linkbait, isn’t it just that we’ve better things to do?
There’s been a few responses to the PC Mag guy – here and on Econsultancy http://econsultancy.com/blog/5184-pc-mag-seo-links (and some more besides I’m sure) – how much more of a response is required?
I agree with you in principle – just because something’s linkbait doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t respond – but I think trying to respond to every ‘hater’ (regardless of whether or not they’re actually a link baiter – ooo that rhymes!) is unnecessary, and there probably aren’t enough hours in the day anyway
It’s one think link baiting the general population with something that adds to a discussion, and one that is done to inflame an industry, one that is already hurting with a bad reputation. Especially written on sites read by thousands.
I scream linkbait AND I insist not giving a link in this case because, lets face it – neither John nor his readers will really see any of those rebuttals. Or care about them unless written in a medium that they respect. The same case with TC, or Shomoney or Calcanis blog – all of which who have access to large volume of readers that are in tech industries, but not so clued up about SEO. Who is going to educate them if crap like these flame posts go up and they only see a one sided argument?
Who are you taking the debate to? The ONLY way you are going to take this debate to them is to challenge them on their own platforms. And the ONLY people who they will take notice of enough to allow such a debate are big name SEOs who to be honest dont care nor have the time to respond.
Lets be honest, even econsultancy hasnt got the reach that these guys do. And looking at the comments on Malcolms post, the people they reach dont all understand “real” SEO either.
I am not against discussing the issue if it was intended to be a real debate. But take it to them, dont bother writing a rebuttal that is only read by a limited number of like minded people. It only gives you the satisfaction of “I said something” not “I said something and they (the original writer) took notice”.
Agreed – the only people who get riled enough to worry about these sorts of articles as linkbait are us SEOs. And we don’t need to preach to the converted. Having us write a counter-article or 10 won’t really be any skin of their nose.
The general fee-paying populus may enjoy hearing about how they really don’t need to spend money on us SEO scammers and it’s all a load of tosh (linkbait or not), are they really interested in reading our irritated response or even bothered enough to make his article worthy of linkbait status?
On principle, I won’t be pushing any links in their direction but I also won’t be wasting further energy fighting our corner yet again. How many times can we write the same rebuttal? One day it’ll be big enough to make it on Question Time and then we’ll see!
BTW thanks to SharkSEO ( http:www.twitter.com/SharkSEO ) here is a video worth watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ
@rishil
Umm thats http://www.twitter.com/SharkSEO duh.
@rishil
@searchpanda
Yeah – bring on the QT!
Fair point Rishi, can’t argue with that. People do get angry when the industry (and by extension the people in it) are bad mouthed however and while a measured response to the right audience is the correct way to react, it’s hard not to vent a little sometimes.
I’ll be honest my own response to it was purely facile, however maybe I should practice what I preach (resolution for 2010 #1)
@stuartpturner – actually I liked your response to it, you gave it the contempt it deserved and it made me giggle. There’s nowt wrong with venting love.
@rishil – fair enough, I hadn’t seen it previously, but that video does suggest he’s aware of baiting people and it was probably his Intention on this case too
@rishil @searchpanda I empathise with the time & futility argument, because it is impossible to respond to everybody, and there is an issue in reaching the audience. Nevertheless, I do think it’s worthwhile engaging (especially if you actually feel compelled to do so ) with these people , because I think the alternative is isolation which in my opinion. I’d also like to think that in an increasingly social world people would get access to both sides of the debate even if the original author completely ignores you , thanks to things like Shared twitter contacts. It’s also very much the case that Google will be able to identify related documents ,and present searchers with both versions – Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case just yet, but it’ll get there.
It’s also good to have a response to hand (whether or not you wrote it) when clients read this kind of stuff too.
@Hannah_bo_banna
Glad to hear it!
I pretty much agree with what @Rishil said. So why did I write that econsultancy piece Hannah mentioned?!
Well, there didn’t seem much point engaging with Dvorak on a point-by-point basis (I did leave a couple of comments on his piece doing that, but the comment pagination meant they were mostly unseen). And I do think his was classic black-hat linkbait – writing something purely for the purpose of generating a response (he’s got form, after all). So I couldn’t see much point writing a long article about how he was talking rubbish – who would see it, who would care, what’s in it for me?
But I do think it’s sometimes worth aiming a response at the platforms that publish this stuff – PC Mag in this case. I was aiming for “a measured response to the right audience” as Stuart said.
If pointing at what-look-like-paid-links makes them think, well, maybe not twice but 1.000001 times next time, maybe it was worth me spending 45 minutes replying. Was it worth it? Probably not in the grand scheme of things. Let’s see if they add nofollow to the ads …!
As for the two anonymous trolls flaming me underneath the story, I thought the best reponse was to point them out to everyone and hope they’d tell them to stop being idiots. Which is largely what happened. I drew the line at being called a tw*t however!
@malcolm coles
Thanks for your comments Malcolm (FYI this is Malcolm’s response to Dvorak on Econsultancy if you haven’t already read it).
I thought you wrote a concise response and highlighted a couple of glaring errors (which should have been addressed even though it is linkbait) without getting emotional about it.