16 Apr
Posted by Joshua Dorkin as Building Traffic, Commentary, Google, Yahoo
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.

3 Responses
SEO Techniques
July 30th, 2007 at 6:56 am
1I think it’s good to see this happen - this way it forces the search engines to constantly kept abreast of the latest techniques/methods that both “white hat” and “black hatters” are using to game the system.
Otherwise, we’d all have to pony up for PPC and the big corps would win out in the long run.
Just my $.02
Digital picture frame
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:09 am
2Search engines can be gamed, but it can kick you out from SERPS.
payday loans
March 17th, 2008 at 4:46 am
3yes but is this thing worht gettin out of SERPS???
i doubt
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Editor: Josh Dorkin
I'm the founder of the website BiggerPockets.com, and have been creating websites since the dawn of graphic browsers. The purpose of this blog is to share some things I've learned about the internet and life.
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