Link bait

Link bait is a derogatory term used to describe a trick to attract inbound links to your blog. John Chow is using a cracker. If you provide a review of his site then he will offer a link back to your site, providing you follow a few review rules which are set out in this post (essentially it should be more than 200 words and contain a link both to the blog and the post which launched the idea).

I'm not following those rules because this is such an amusing idea. Technorati's major measure of authority is links, and John Chow is subverting it in a very simple and direct way. He is currently reported at 834 in Technorati with inbound links from over 1300 blogs. That's pretty impressive, but what is more interesting is that when he launched this link bait idea, the blog ranked at 1529. Just to put this in context - Technorati is now tracking over 63.2 million blogs so John Chow's blog has greater authority on Technorati than 99.98% of the blogs they track.

I'm not a great fan of inbound links as a measure of authority and relevance and this exercise shows just what a poor quality metric it is.