A Potential Pitfall For Linkbait?

Linkbait has been a popular topic lately for all Internet marketers and I have been reading a lot about the downsides of linkbait or at least the potential loss of value a lot of marketers seem to be concerned about. Recently Aaron Wall made a post that I missed called “Link Bait is the New Reciprocal Links Page”.

In his post Aaron discusses the potential pitfalls of outrageous spikes in incoming links and the possibilities that Google and other search engines maybe tracking organic link growth and not passing along the expected value to sites that don’t continuously supply new linkbait to keep their incoming link growth patterns steady. Aaron goes on to suggests that the search engines may actually appreciate the popularity of linkbait because it makes their job easier when it comes to detecting artificial increases in natural links.

I believe Aaron has good points in making marketers aware that linkbait may have less perceived value than it did five minutes before you read his article, but I don’t believe that just because Google or another search engine might devalue a set of links is any reason to be afraid of generating linkbait. Links that generate traffic, whether or not a search engine values them, in my mind are still good links…

Still, knowing how search engines are looking at the growth in natural links should give marketers the ability to develop solid strategies to take advantage of their most successful linkbait.