Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

There’s a great case study on link bait at SEOmoz. The thing that really separates this is that he gives data on his results. Too often it’s general actions rather than specific ones. Still missing are the specific keywords he was targeting, but that doesn’t really change how you can take this case study and apply the specifics to your situation.

One great thing was that the topic of the linkbait: “8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers”. You can completely see how this would garner attention. The page was buried on an inside page on a car dealership website. It was posted on Reddit and Digg and within five days, the site received almost 234,000 unique visitors.

“We knew from the beginning the traffic would absolutely be worthless… The purpose was to help a site that was relatively unknown get a little bit of authority. It was the backlinks we were interested in,”

Look at the links the site received…
Before the Digg: 207 backlinks
3 days after Digg: 1,270 backlinks
5 days after Digg: 2,642 backlinks
7 days after Digg: 3,545 backlinks

“We already know that untargeted backlinks are not nearly as effective as targeted ones from authority sites with similar content. The Digg did, however, produce links from many sites with authority in areas that are not entirely unrelated, and in some cases, from some sites with very high traffic and trust…

Google’s latest crawl (7 days after the Digg) resulted in a huge increase in our rankings for our targeted keywords. We jumped up anywhere from 20-300 places, with most of our most important keywords ranking in the top ten (many in the top 5). Furthermore, Google has increased its rate of indexing, has increased the number of our pages that appear in the index, and have released over a dozen important pages from the supplemental results.”

That really does validate all the talk SEO heavyweights give to linkbait. I need to get cracking…