Last week Jim Boykin wrote yet another article critical of Link Baiting, insisting that stealthy, steady link building by a Link Ninja was a much more effective strategy. While traditional link building is a necessary evil, I feel it is my sworn duty to make a case for the awesome power of a scurvy crew of Bait Pirates!
In this case, we’ll examine the swarthy deeds of pillage and plunder undertaken by the crew of Drivl and witness the copious amounts of Link Booty they’ve amassed.
For those of you who’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that Drivl has been mentioned on SEOmoz quite a few times in recent days. It’s time to come clean: we write for Drivl. There, consider us transparent. It’s a fun, satirical, snarky and occasionally crude site that we’ve been charged with building traffic for. Be warned that any “professional” image you may have of us will likely be destroyed upon viewing Drivl. Keep in mind that we’re writing to achieve a certain voice and dynamic with the site. In a sense I suppose that makes us Privateers more than Pirates, but close enough.
How’s this relate to Bait Pirates vs. Link Ninjas? Well, when we were handed Drivl by our client at the end of October, it had about 90 inbound links and an average of 50 visitors per day (after about a year online). In the three months since we took it over and relaunched the site, we’ve gained over 19,000 inbound links and average around 5,500 daily unique visitors. Here’s the catch: we’ve done this without any traditional link building. Not one karate chop, roundhouse kick, tiger uppercut, ninja star or blade tornado. It was all piracy, BAIT PIRACY! Many a tankard o’ grog hath been drunk, and many a fine cannonade hath been fired in our voyage through Digg-infested seas.
This was completely intentional. About a week into the project, we made a conscientious decision to forgo any link building in order to test the success of an all-bait, all-the-time strategy. Suffice to say, we’ve been quite amazed by the results. In addition, we’ve played with writing articles specifically to bait for specific, high-traffic keywords with pretty impressive success. For instance, one Drivl article (slightly NSFW) ranked 11th at Google for ‘nudity’ (358,000 searches/mo) and 5th for ‘celebrity nudity’ (19,700 searches/mo) after just three days online.
One could argue that these results indicate savvy Bait Piracy can be more effective in gaining links, even targeted and high-quality links, than Link Ninjitsu. Again, I’m not completely discounting the value of traditional link building–we still do it and consider it an integral part of an SEO campaign–but I do think it’s possible and perhaps even advisable to use Bait Piracy to acquire organic links in bulk, and use Link Ninjitsu techniques to acquire highly specific, competitive links from specific domains.
I’d be interested to hear any numbers any of you have for Bait vs. Build campaigns and any thoughts you have about the effectiveness of Bait Pirates vs. Link Ninjas in spite of or in light of those numbers and/or the numbers we’ve seen with Drivl.
