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Google invented hoaxbait
By Adam C | July 17, 2008
A couple of months ago the search slice of the blogosphere was ablaze with discussion around the Lyndon Antcliff linkbait extravaganza. Lyndon posted a case study of a successful piece of linkbait he’d created for a client. The bait was a fictional story about a 13 year old kid who had stolen his dad’s credit card and spent big on hookers and video games. The story wasn’t marked as fiction, and was subsequently picked up by mainstream media including the Sun Scum and Fox News.
Lyndon’s case study caused uproar in the community. “Lying for links is unethical” was the cry from many SEO’s, not to mention the ungrateful client (at it again?), and implied by Matt Cutts.
My take? Well, mainstream media have been doing this for years. I doubt seriously that the Sun were at all bothered whether the story was real or fake… it would be interesting to their readers, and therefore worth publishing. They’ve been doing that for years.
And so have Google…
It reminded me also of a prank a friend of mine ran back in 2000 or there abouts. Jack put up a couple of posters in the South London suburb in which we lived at the time claiming there to be a crocodile living in a local pond, advising residents to keep an eye out.
The prank was backed up on Jack’s satirical blog used by his circle of friends, and with a couple of phone calls to local journalists, brought about coverage in all the local papers, and a handful of links to boot. At the time, blogs were few and far between, and the concept of linkbait largely unknown. Lets call this pressbait, though I’m sure there’s a better term.
Moving on a year or two, hoaxbait started rearing its head. Dare I say it, Google were one of the first proponents to gain significant links with their annual April Fools gags (pigeon rank, job swaps with Yahoo employees, etc.). I jumped on the bandwagon with a colleague at the time, with a cooked up yarn about Microsoft buying Google. A touch of forum spamming posting later and our industry bloggers started reposting our link (thanks Barry and Aaron - hard to believe you could probably have counted the number of SEO bloggers at the time on the fingers on one hand).
So, back up to date and there is uproar about a phony story gaining coverage and links. So what? Let Google work out what to do with it. They started it.
Topics: SEO |
