Seems like a bit of a technological stretch to me – because of course a domain that today deals with welsh nose flutes might well have been a shopping directory a year ago when the linkbait was happening.

I’d still say it’s worth doing now for the potential long term benefit of establishing links today that might benefit the domain for years to come – relevance or no relevance.

Once Google effectively tackles it though, I think we’ll start to see relevancy becoming absolutely critical to linkbaiting.

Absolutely, but as to how successful they’ll be, that’s a different matter. For more complex sites it could be a challenge to determine what is relevant, as the topics could be all over the place. But I do think that a change is coming to this, which will force a change in the way that people use linkbait.