Link baiting has been talked about on many SEO & link building websites. Link baiting essentially employs writing good quality content relating to the industry you are in. Because the post answers common questions or concern held in the industry, in theory, it is assumed that a lot of people will link to the post which will help your SEO efforts.
But the way the link-baiting articles were written on websites and blogs gave the impression that either the author did not know a whole lot about this subject or he or she has not personally tried using this method. Normally, the articles would tell you to write an interesting "How to" or "10Tips to" post for a certain industry, make sure the post is really good and sit back while hundreds of websites link to you. In that way, the authors argued, you will get free "good quality" links.
Here is the problem. I have written many articles for the sole purpose of link baiting to see if the technique works. To my disappointment, I suspect I never had more than 3 incoming links to those pages. Now I understand that this website is a still quite new, but the fact remains that even though you are an authority in a niche, I just do not see thousands of people linking to one blog post, no matter how good it is.
Therefore, although the theory behind link baiting is good, in practice, this method falls flat on its face normally. Why?
Because you are spending your quality time to research, rephrase and put up the information in a good quality post or article. And as everyone would know, time is money. But unless your website is already dominating its niche, there wont be hundreds (or even tens) of people who will link to your article or post.
Plus, even if hundreds of people did link to your "link bait" page, that is not the page you want to rank high for, right? Think about it. Apart from that, even if for some reason you would actually want the link bait page itself to rank, you can never optimize your effort fully, because natural links coming your way will never care about the anchor text that you would want to use.
In my opinion, using link-baiting (in most cases) is like giving someone $100 just so he can give you $10 back.
Maybe this technique would help you in micro-niches, where it would be very easy to portray yourself as an expert on your subject, but for bigger niches I do not think this technique warrants itself to be used.
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