Young Entrepreneur Blog

If you are familiar with terms like “link baiting”, “social media” and “buzz marketing”, you will be aware that it is now possible to generate huge amounts of back links to a website in a very short space of time.

It would seem that some people like to call this term SpeedLinking and as usual with any new or dramatic technique, there are some people who are claiming that speed linking is actual a bad thing.

So do we have anything to worry about with speed linking?

The short answer is no!

I am yet to see any evidence that having successful content on your site will harm your rankings.

So why are a few people claiming this?

This reminds me of when people were accused of witch craft hundreds of years ago.

For example, I was at a party a few months ago and I was telling a friend that I make a living online. Someone overheard me and said “you can’t make money online, it is a scam!”

It turned out that this person didn’t even have an internet connection, but often, it is easier to dismiss other people’s success than to do some proper research.

Is there any logic in it?

Three or four years ago the only realistic way you were going to get 10,000 backlinks in one week was by buying them. So I can understand why perhaps, Google has/had some filters in place.

But in today’s world we are all focused on social media, authority content etc… and with the help of sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit etc… it is easier than ever to get huge amounts of links in a short space of time.

Put it this way… it would be like penalising the successful sites for being better than the rest. Sites like BBC, Engadget etc… are regulars on Digg.com, yet they still rank higher than most, if not all sites in their industries.

Summary

I do agree that it would make sense to dampen the strength of a huge amount of links, but “dampen” and “penalise” are two VERY different words.

Matt Cutts from Google had this to say:

Linkbaiting sounds like a bad thing, but especially if it’s interesting information or fun, it doesn’t have to have negative connotations. I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful “bait” for links.

I believe this is a modern day witch hunt by people who don’t quite grasp the concept. So by all means, keep creating quality content and ignore the witch hunters.

Note: For more reading by someone else who shares my philosphy on this, read here: linkbaiting, why the fuss?

Happy Linking.