In its most basic form, link bait is content that is designed to inspire readers to link to it and/or share it with others. While link bait will often drive a large number or readers or viewers (it is similar to viral content in this aspect) the most critical component of any link bait campaign is to generate the desired response: linking.

Why Are Links Important?

Quite simply, links are the fuel that propels websites up the search engine rankings. Google’s Webmaster Help Center explains it like this:

“Make sure that other sites link to yours – Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page’s importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines.

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.”

Is Link Bait “Natural”?

Google’s explanation of the importance of links naturally leads to the question “How do Google and the other search engines view links obtained through link bait campaigns?”

To answer that question I’ll once again turn to Google. This time the source is a blog post written the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts.

“Linkbaiting sounds like a bad thing, but especially if it’s interesting information or fun, it doesn’t have to have negative connotations. I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful “bait” for links. And generating information or ideas that people talk about is a surefire way to generate links.”

Quite simply, link bait is the quickest, most affordable way to generate massive numbers of natural inbound links to your website.