Gaining high PR links is the Holy Grail of SEO, there’s nothing more important SEO wise than those high PR backlinks, they drive a sites SEO success and one way to generate backlinks is linkbait.

I own over 100 domains and have had webpages as high as PR6 without doing any of the following link building techniques:

Comment link spamming
Forum link spamming
Submitting to directories
Article submission
Reciprocal linking
Buying text links
Guest posting

I do have a small number of reciprocal link partners, mainly helping out friends with websites as I don’t need the backlinks and the SEO benefit of reciprocal linking relative to the time it takes to maintain is minimal. Pretty much irrelevant to my link building.

I occasionally post on forums and comment on others blogs, but not for backlinks, most links from forums and blog comments are nofollow anyway which have no direct SEO link benefit value (pass no PR or anchor text benefit). Irrelevant to my link building.

The vast majority of my network of websites PageRank is derived via creating something that acts as link bait.

What is Link Bait

LinkbaitLinkbait is pretty much anything that results in other webmasters adding backlinks to your content without having to return a backlink, buy the links etc…

What I do is create content webmasters might link to and offer free products (AdSense WordPress themes and BlogSpot AdSense Templates for example) that generate backlinks.

A lot of my networks link benefit comes from natural backlinks to parts of my network specifically created to generate linking.

It’s not rocket science, the majority of users online don’t care about or understand SEO, when they see something they like they link to it. The problem is how do you persuade a webmaster to link to your content when your content isn’t something someone would naturally link to?

Answer is you don’t! Instead you create additional content webmasters will link to AKA link bait.

SEO Moz Link Bait Example

Since explaining the SEOMoz link bait example below, SEOMoz has since rebranded to Moz and moved domains. Which means my Google link:domain searches no longer show the results I use below: seomoz.org 301 redirects to moz.com and they’ve renamed some the article names I used as examples as well.

Guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, the SEO Moz linkbait example was a good one :-0

SEOMoz Link Bait

There’s an SEO services site seomoz.org (you’ll note I’m not linking to it because I understand SEO), there’s a section on their website “Pricing and Plans” where they try to sell their “SEOmoz PRO – SEO & Social Monitoring Software In One”. No idea what it is as not tried it.

If you check the Google backlinks for the plans page-

link:http://www.seomoz.org/plans

You will find around 25 backlinks. There’s a sitewide backlink to this page, hence the PR5, most link benefit is probably from the sitewide link.

They have some interesting search engine optimization articles on the website that make for great link bait-

SEO Industry Survey link

link:http://www.seomoz.org/seo-industry-survey

You will find around 41 backlinks. No sitewide backlink, hence the PR4, but it’s pulling links into the site and the PR/link benefit feeds via the sitewide link to the services they want you to buy.

Then there’s the 2011 edition of the Search Engine Ranking Factors article

link:http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

You will find almost 300 backlinks. No sitewide backlink, but it’s pulling in so many organic links into the site it’s PR6 and the PR/link benefit feeds via the sitewide link to the services they want you to buy.

Pretty cool SEO link bait hey.

Good Link Bait Ideas Work

You might be interested to know when I wrote the above three page examples above I wrote them in that order as I checked them. I knew what the SEO result would be before looking, I didn’t check all three URLs in advance and determine they are good examples to illustrate my link baiting point, it was obvious in advance it would be as it is.

Remember the Google link:http://www.domain.com/ search doesn’t show all backlinks, only gives a small number, but you’ll tend to get an idea of the number of organic backlinks some link bait is generating compared to the content no one really wants to link to.

If you have a website selling boring widgets it’s not going to generate organic backlinks, just like SEOmoz is going to struggle to generate organic links to their “SEOmoz PRO – SEO & Social Monitoring Software In One page” that’s trying to sell an SEO service. Which is why they generate a lot of free content in the SEO niche that webmasters will link to, and getting organic backlinks from webmasters who are in the SEO niche (like me) is HARD, we don’t like to link out!

David Law

David Law > AKA SEO Dave
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: 20+ Years Experience as a Freelance SEO Consultant, WordPress SEO Expert, Internet Marketer, Developer of Multiple WordPress SEO Plugins/SEO Themes Including the Stallion Responsive Theme.

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