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Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of discussion about link baiting.  From forum posts on link baiting (such as “what is it and how do I do it?") to articles explaining why some things shouldn’t be link bait.

So let’s start there.  SEOMoz, considered one of the best sources on linkbaiting explains why some articles shouldn’t be link bait.  In this blog post SEOMoz shows us how some Web 2.0 sites such as Digg can be “played” to artificially inflate a poorly written article’s “worth.” In other words, someone wrote up an article about SEO, and then submitted it to Digg and other social type sites and somehow managed to get it’s ranking increased substantially in a short time.  This earned the piece the title “A Piece of Content that Doesn’t Deserve to be Linkbait”

In another bad linking tactic, Matt Cutts recently posted on his blog a very poor example of an actual link exchange email.  Now if there’s one thing we know about link exchanges, you need to do a little research on who you are requesting the link from.  At least get their name, so you can personalize the email somewhat.  Something tells me that “Ivan” the person who sent this email to Matt Cutts isn’t going to get that link that he wanted, what do you think?

Copyblogger has an article on mind control.

So did that get your attention?  It sure got ours, which is why it deserves a mention here.  That’s because as the art of link baiting becomes more mainstream it is going to become even harder to capture links from other sites.  You are going to need compelling titles just to get noticed (as this title did) plus some cleverly and intelligently written copy in order to convince people to link to you.  While this article doesn’t come out and say that we feel that is the message.

On a more technical note, Microsoft has improved it’s search offering by allowing webmasters to do more complex link searches.  According to the LiveSearch Weblog, you can now perform a query which “includes all sites that are linked from a given domain.” The new query is LinkFromDomain and can be used in conjunction with LinkDomain to give you a more complete picture of links on the web (at least in Microsoft’s eyes.

Finally, to the forums.  SEORoundtable has a good discussion on whether or not it is effective to purchase sitewide links from a PR8 site.  Now, there is some debate on the effectiveness of such tactics, but that is mostly because there are a lot of factors which will influence whether the engines consider these as quality links.  For example, if a plumber were able to purchase sitewide links from Microsoft they wouldn’t likely be worth much to the plumbers site because they are in unrelated industries.  However, if he were able to purchase them from a home improvement site, they may (and we emphasize may) have a positive influence on his link popularity.  But even links from related and relevant sites may not be included for a variety of reasons.

The forum also goes on to say that some sites can be penalized for sitewide links.  This is a possibility but again a lot can influence that, such as the number of links, how quickly they appeared (i.e. Did you get 5 links or 500 in one month?) and how the total links acquired “fits in” to the number of links you traditionally acquire over a time period.

So you see, there is no “good or bad” answer to sitewide links.

There you have it, a summary of the top link building news for the past two weeks.  Be sure to watch for our next newsletter where we will bring you more link building news.