Background
As the blogosphere becomes more competitive, bloggers are constantly looking for ways to grow their blogs. One important measure of a blog's success comes from the number of incoming links to it, particularly links from other popular blogs and websites. Search engines such as Google and Technorati use incoming links as a factor in determining how popular a blog is with the thought being, more popular blogs are more authoritative and should be ranked higher in search results.
Rankings on sites such as Google and Technorati affect bloggers in several ways. First, advertisers typically look at those rankings to gauge the popularity of a blog, which affects the amount they're willing to pay to place advertisements on that blog. Second, higher rankings typically equate to more traffic simply because search results often deliver results from higher ranking sites first.
With those factors in mind, bloggers pursue many avenues to increase the number of links to their blogs. Some bloggers resort to writing posts deemed as "linkbait". In simplest terms, linkbait posts are those written primarily because they are likely to generate traffic. Typically, linkbait posts are written about hot topics (think Britney Spears), which might have nothing to do with the blog topic. However, the blogger hopes to get a boost in traffic by writing about the linkbait topic.
The question many bloggers ask is whether or not linkbaiting is a good idea. The pros and cons of linkbaiting are discussed below to help you make an educated decision before you write a post for linkbait purposes.
