Internet Marketing Blog by Noon-an-Night

Last week, SEOmoz wrote a post called Google Search Results Missing from OneBox. The post included humorous examples of OneBox results that Google should include, such as:

The next day, they reported about the success of their OneBox parody. According to their Holy Mother of Linkbait post, the post not only received over 2400 Diggs, but some of the results they included in their parody ended up influencing Google’s Hot Trends. Additionally, their site received a huge amount of visitors from Digg, as demonstrated by this graph:

Given the successes reported in their follow-up post, it seemed their original parody was quite the successful piece of linkbait. However, Patrick Altoft provided some interesting commentary in his It’s good but is it linkbait post earlier today.

If an article gets on the Digg front page the average number of links is 300. This article got more Diggs than average and has just 66 links and a lot of those are from the scrapers that publish everything that gets on Digg.

As an example of extremely successful linkbait, Patrick provided this example with the following commentary:

The best viral campaign I’ve seen recently got 20 diggs (less than 100 times the number SEOmoz got) and currently has 15,000 links.

The 15,000 links point to the video’s homepage, dothetest.co.uk. A comment on Patrick’s post from one of the creators of the 4 month old site stated they they will eventually redirect the site to a page on their main site.

So, if you want to actually get some value from a piece of viral content instead of simply causing your server to get pounded by Digg traffic, I recommend following this advice:

The reason so many people fail at linkbait is because they start publishing articles like this with no thought to why people would link to them - nobody links to linkbait without a reason.