Link bait, or content designed to gather inbound link juice, isn’t always as successful as we’d like it to be. In an ideal world, your quality, unique article will hit the front pages of Digg and Reddit, bring a flood of Stumblers, and get syndicated by a plethora of huge authority sites in your niche. Hey, you might even get favourable anchor text.

However for many, things don’t go quite as planned, and a link lure turns out to be a fantastic flop. There are many causes of such failure, and I’ve skimmed over two of the main ones below.

Reasons for link bait failure

• Quick, but not quick enough - Despite your best efforts to cover a breaking news story, you don’t quite get your article out in time. The story is already popular on Digg and Reddit by the time you try to submit, and the authority sites in your niche have their coverage up citing a variety of early sources - just not yours. Your story, without backing from a great brand or unique twist, fades into the background of the blogosphere.
• Lacking ‘diggability’ - Some topics just aren’t lapped up by the social news crowd. Those who don’t blog about consumer electronics, politics or web startups will know what I’m talking about. As a result, if your website isn’t aligned with what’s currently popular on the web, it will probably be harder to gain traction on crowd-sourced news hubs.

So in the midst of these link building pitfalls, is there a way to improve your chances of going popular? There may be - if you’re willing to bend the truth.

Lying for links - the concept

The solution is, to put it bluntly, lying. Creating the perfect story. This notion, in a slightly different form, hit the headlines recently when Wired and others bent the truth about colour-changing paint.

The symptoms of an ineffective backlink campaign can all be cured using this method, but the remedy isn’t without its problems. The idea is ridiculously clever, because not only will you automatically be first to cover this fictitious fable, but you can also sculpt it for social news acceptance.

Take, for instance, the subject of stamp collecting. Not hugely cool, or newsworthy for the most part. So how do you write a stamp article that will drag in the backlinks? Off the top of my head:

• World’s most expensive stamp collection sells for £3.75m
• Steve Jobs, Kevin Rose & others to appear on tech industry-themed stamp collection

These examples aren’t great, but you get the idea - sensationalism is key. You’ll need to fabricate an authentic-looking article, and draw attention away from the fact that you don’t cite any sources.

Consequences

This scheme can have a variety of effects. Some are positive; some negative.

Pros

• If your article is good enough, your link may go popular and result in a big traffic and link influx.
• Your article may be ousted as a fake, but you gain extra backlinks as the cat is let out of the bag.

Cons

• As a result of steering your story in the direction of popular topics, the backlinks you obtain are likely to be from websites with low topical relevance to yours.
• Your article is unwrapped and labeled a fraud, denting your site’s reputation and impairing future link building efforts.

With such a dodgy practice, the outcome is very unpredictable. Consequently, lying for links is a pretty bad idea. If you feel you must pull a Pinocchio, then please only employ it on brand new websites looking to grab attention (any publicity is good publicity). Those with existing visibility and status in their niche will need considerably bigger plums than I have to even consider telling a porky. Use with caution.