Surely true ‘link bait’ offers those who link a reward of some kind, a thank you for linking, be it a free download, commission or any other incentive dangled as bait.

writting fraudulent articles so people link to them is just simply deception and fraud.

Don’t get upset Jill, these SEOs who stoop to such levels as to release false articles are just simply con artists not professionals such as yourself.

It also goes to show how G! needs to change it’s entire premise on how to rank pages.

Quantity of links, as this proves, does not equate to quality of content, regardless of how popular the page seems to be, if the content is a lie, who cares how many people have linked to it!

Link building, like any aspect of SEO, can be done with the searchers best interests in mind, and if the end result of publishing beneficial information for your audience is that loads of people want to link to it - that’s linkbait with integrity.

If everyone was to start making up garbage and passing it off as legitimate in an effort to attract links, it will likely lead to another whole rehashing of link value by the search engines. There’s always someone out there who believes they’re above playing by the rules and the risk is they ruin it for everyone.

So - it’s actually *worse* to make up news as a marketing ploy, especially as a client, than say if you work for a magazine or as a freelancer and turn in some phony story. To me, the fallout of the phony story is that you breached journalistic ethics and some kind of professional journalism piano is going to fall on your head. By contrast, trying to market something, or yourself, with phony stories that are supposed to be real is actually going to potentially screw up a solid company, causing real economic damage as opposed to resulting in a mere professional scolding…

Hey, I understand hoaxes can be fun. I once wrote a fake “alumni update” for a friend’s entry in the university alumni mag. But I can see how it would be rightfully ticked off by this. It was immature, much like the “marketers” who truly believe that “any tactic” is ok “as long at it…” achieves x,y,z.

Any tactic? Like what, post child porn on your blog? So no, you should admit there is a line somewhere. No one believes that “any tactic” is fine. Those that claim so are screwing up the industry.

That means I take EVERYTHING I read in the news with a large grain of salt.

But I agree with you - telling an out and out lie for the purpose of getting links is a stinky practice.

@sherwood, I agree that’s an issue, but to me it’s definitely not the biggest issue. Personally, I don’t like the idea of us (whomever that might be) adding to the sad state that our media has found itself.