How Linkbait is Diluting the Accuracy of Search Engine Results

Looking to increase traffic for your website? For a little over a year, the use of linkbait has exploded across the net. People have figured out little tricks for building traffic. some of which are very clever, but at some point, doesn’t it dilute the quality of ranking results?

Gaming the Search Engines is Too Easy!
Sure, you can do something inventive to bring a mass of traffic to your site, but if the traffic is not targeted or if the post is unrelated to your site’s purpose, you’re still building up backlinks and authority in the eyes of the search engines. This doesn’t make any sense. In addition, I think it just shows how easily the Search engines can be gamed.

In the “clever” example mentioned earlier, a webmaster posted a political cartoon on a webpage for a cabinetry company. The posting brough him thousands of visitors through social bookmarking and social media sites. He gained at least 40 backlinks from it (according to him), and as a result will score higher in the rankings by the engines.

Does he deserve the traffic that ge gets from the stunt? Sure. Does his carpentry site deserve all the extra buzz it will get as a result? Probably not, but because the SEs allow themselves to be manipulated, he is set. Now all he has to do is duplicate the experiment and he’ll start to see some gaina in search results.

I have nothing against people getting traffic to their sites and being creative, but I just wonder if linkbaiting will get out of hand and really reduce the quality of results from the search providers.