Linkbaiting
The term linkbaiting is not new in the blogosphere. It can be also referred to as link baiting, link bait, or linkbait. In general, this expression describes the actions that webmasters and bloggers undertake in order to increase the number of incoming links to their websites. They do this because they are hoping that it will bring more traffic and increase some important ranks including Google Page Rank. Here are some examples of linkbaiting:
1. Running a contest where one of the requirements is to link back to your site from a post.
2. Commenting on other blogs hoping that the author of this blog will link to you.
3. Providing other webmasters and bloggers with free tools and widgets that they will be able to use. In case of linkbaiting, you should make sure that such tools and widgets include a link to your blog.
It is true that webmasters and bloggers have been doing things mentioned above for many years now, even before the term linkbaiting existed. There is currently a debate going on as to whether linkbaiting is ethically right or wrong. There is no doubt that bloggers have different feelings towards such practices. What some consider as spamming, others might even appreciate. From the three points I mentioned above, I do not consider any of them to be ethically wrong. However, there are more linkbaiting techniques that I did not include in this article that can rise a question whether they are ethically justifiable.
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