It is, like Lisa Barone mentioned earlier, time to let your link baiting campaign grow up. This starts with focusing your link bait campaigns the right way, by using the right hook and by dropping your bait in the right place. And what type of hook to use and where to drop your bait, depends on the goals you’ve set.

This post will give some guidance in how to choose the right hook to reach those goals you’ve set.

Defining your goals
Just like with any other marketing activity, you’ll have to set yourself a clear goal first. Do you simply need lot a lot of traffic? Are you looking for lots of bookmarks? Or do you only want to improve your search engine rankings, no matter what strategy it takes? You’ll need to have a clear goal in mind. When you’re shooting with a shotgun while you’re being blindfolded, you will certainly hit something, but were you aiming for it?

There are numerous types of goals you can set for your self, but every possible goal will include one or more of the following factors:

• Links (are you looking for lots of, or quality links)
• Traffic (do you want lots of, or qualified visitors)
• Buzz (are you only aiming at buzz/ branding)
• Bookmarks (are you mainly looking for bookmarks)
• Durability (do you want your campaign to have a long shelf life)

Choosing your hook
There are several types of hooks (or content creation approaches, or types of link magnets, or whatever you want to call them) you can choose from. The most important ones and the ones with the biggest potential are being mentioned below, together with the possible potential of each hook. This way it’s easier to see which hook can help you best in reaching your goals.

  News
The news hook either needs commitment, or just dumb luck. If you really want to get that piece of valuable breaking news, you’ll probably need to do loads of research, networking and investigation first. And even then, you really have to be the first one that mentions it and let others know that you’ve found something new. Or, if you’re lucky, it just drops at your feet. But I wouldn’t count on the last thing to happen
If you use this hook over and over again, you’ll be able to attract lots of loyal visitors, but this usually also needs dedication and lots of time to achieve.

Examples:
- Be the first to find out about a PageRank update (no, really)
- Write something about B-52’s flying over the US (seriously)

Amount of traffic	****
Amount of links	***
Quality of traffic	***
Quality of links	****
Buzz potential	****
Bookmark potential	**
Durability	**

  Education & Information
Using the Education & Information hook is probably one of the best ways to attract targeted, quality links. If you educate people about a subject you know a lot about, that will lead to relevant and high quality links for sure. It’s also a great way to show what you’re capable of, and build yourself a solid brand this way. If you are able to update your piece of content once (or regularly), you’ll end up with a page that’s capable of generating links until eternity. The con of this hook, however is that it takes a lot of effort and time to build a good piece of information. But this is usually being outweighed by the amount of links.

Examples:
- Aaron Wall’s 101 Ways to attract links (over 2K links)
- How to build a tin can waveguide WiFi antenna (no, I’m not kidding)

Amount of traffic	***
Amount of links	***
Quality of traffic	****
Quality of links	****
Buzz potential	**
Bookmark potential	****
Durability	****

(more…)

Google just updated their toolbar PageRank score for the third time in three weeks. The score you’re seeing in the toolbar at this moment has probably been exported on the 2nd of October, somewhere between 3.45pm and 8.55pm.

As of today, Wiep.net is a PageRank 3, which sucks in my opinion. I really liked that big fat zero!

Ah, well, I think it’s kind of flattering to receive the same score as YouTube…

There were several great posts about linkbait this week. Eric Lander explained How to build a solid linkbait in three easy steps and Patrick Winfield added step four; Using images in a linkbait is important as well. Lisa Barone explains why link bait should mature. “What do you call grown up link bait? You call it a link magnet.”

Another great post that I came across was Dee Barizo’s What everybody ought to know about Link Building. It isn’t a brand new post, but I stumbled upon it last week and think it has a few great points. I’m sure you’ll get the most important one.

Glenn Allsopp explains Why submitting to directories can work very well for authority websites. This, combined with Bob Massa’s post about What a directory submission is worth will probably result in lots of submissions for the large directories during the next few weeks…

And also:

• This is probably the worst way to ask for a link
• Derek J. Edmond’ lists some great tips about How to evaluate a link building opportunity
• Leo Babauta writes about How linking out can get you lots of links in return, at North x East
• Eric Enge gives a few great Large scale link building tips
• We all know about anchor text, but How do you optimize links usability wise?
• There was some fuss about paid links. So what have we learned?

A Google PageRank update (a bigger one than earlier this month) has punished large scale blog networks and similar heavy cross linking sites by cutting their PageRank scores. The update also hit several sites that sell (or sold) direct links.

Some of the large sites that got hit:
Engadget.com (both network and selling links)
Joystiq.com (same network)
Space.com (network)
Problogger (network)
SearchEngineGuide.com (selling links?)
SearchEngineJournal.com (selling links?)
NewScientist.com (selling links)
WashingtonPost.com (selling links)
Forbes.com (selling links)

Not only big websites have been hit, I’ve seen multiple examples of small websites that got hit. Some for using TLA, but not every website selling TLA links got hit. Some for selling regular links, but not every website that sells links got hit. Some for being in a network, but, well, you get the point. It’s too much penalties for a hand job, but too little for an algorithmic change. Patrick Altoft has an interesting view on this, I think it’s a mix of all these things.

Andy Beard has listed several other websites that got hit, more coverage about this subject can be found at SearchEngineLand.

But what about the rankings?
Two comments in the enormous amount of discussions caught my attention, Jill Whalen’s comment at Sphinn and g1smd’s comment at SEO Scoop. They immediately focused their attention on where everything is happening: the SERPs.

Most of the websites that got hit didn’t see major changes in Google referers or in rankings in general. But rankings go further than that, especially when you investigate the link selling websites. Let’s take a look at how the advertisers rank.

If you take a closer look at the NewScientist, WashingtonPost.com and Forbes.com, you’ll notice that these websites obviously got hit for selling links. Direct text links in “sponsored links” blocks aren’t that hard to spot.

Forbes.com
Advertiser 1 (virus related keyword) ranks #4 in Google, competition 12,000,000
Advertiser 2 (printing related keyword) ranks #23 in Google, competition 88,000,000
Advertiser 3 (credit card related keyword) ranks #10 in Google, competition 2,000,000
Advertiser 4 (printing related keyword) ranks #4 in Google, competition 2,900,000

WashingtonPost.com
Advertiser 1 (attorney related keyword) ranks #1 in Google, competition 2,000,000
Advertiser 2 (retail related keyword) ranks #8 in Google, competition 3,900,000
Advertiser 3 (drug related keyword) ranks #9 in Google, competition 2,300,000
Advertiser 4 (debt related keyword) ranks #1 in Google, competition 125,000,000

NewScientist.com
Advertiser 1 (camera related keyword) ranks #1 in Google (UK), competition 102,000,000
Advertiser 2 (moving related keyword) ranks #1 in Google, competition 2,000,000
Advertiser 3 (moving related keyword) ranks #25 in Google, competition 58,000,000
Advertiser 4 (tv related keyword) ranks #6 in Google, competition 404,000,000

While these results aren’t stunningly high, some of the rankings of the advertisers on the anchor texts used are quite impressive. On the other hand, not every advertiser ranks for the anchor text they used.

So who got hit then?
This PageRank update seems like yet another example of FUD. The only thing that has changed, is the TBPR. The PR-punished websites don’t see changes in rankings and the text link buyers also rank pretty high in most cases. So, what kind of penalty is this?

The only ones that got hit are PageRank sellers. Their only selling point is PageRank, because they most often have a poor website with crappy backlinks. And with that PageRank sliced from 6 to 3, they have even less to offer to possible advertisers.

And let’s be honest, is that really a bad thing?

Messages like “Problem Loading Page” suck. Especially when it’s your website returning that message. Like, for an entire day or so.

When I made the choice for cheap in stead of reliable, I could expect going down within 9 seconds after hitting the Digg frontpage, but almost 24 hours downtime because of “file maintenance” without even sending a notification?!?

Thank god I’ll be moving soon…

Update: Crap, apparently, my email failed to work for the past 24 hours as well. If you received an error in an attempt to contact me, please try again. Sorry for the inconvenience…

Today, I realized, that in stead of writing about When to Stop Your Link Building Activities, I should have been discussing where to start your link building activities first. So let’s discuss an example of really easy-to-access data you can use while starting up your link building campaign.

The starting point of your link building campaign depends on the phase of your website. There are two possible phases where your website can be at; phase 1 and phase 2.

Phase 1: Your website is less than one year old.
Phase 2: Your website is older than one year.

If your website is still in phase one; build content first (and try to create some buzz while you’re at it). While Jim Boykin puts the bar at two years, I tend to believe that it should be possible to target those mid- to high competition keywords when your website is around a year to a year and a half old.

Hopefully, you’re already in phase two. In that case, valuable info that you can use for your link building campaign is closer than you think; it’s in the 404 error page statistics of the Google Webmaster Tools console.

Especially larger websites, or websites that have already gathered a substantial amount of (natural) links, tend to have at least a few URLs that couldn’t be found by Google.

If you let Yahoo’s SiteExplorer check which pages link to these Not Found URLs (thank you Google for not updating your backlink data), you’re not only able to fix a few broken internal links, but it also might show you several websites that link to obsolete or non existing URLs.

Contacting these webmasters and asking them to change the link is like stealing candy from a baby. They have already linked to you and will appreciate it even more if you let them know that you visit their website and show your dedication.

And while your at it, you can also ask them to change the link text slightly by adding a keyword relevant to your web page