How Linkbait Will Die: Transactional vs Informational Quality Signals

If you're going to hire a plumber, do you really care whether or not they create great linkbait? Of course not. If you search for "plumbers in kansas city," you want a good plumber in Kansas City, regardless of how clever they are with their internet marketing. That fact that linkbait succeeds for non-media products means Google has a flaw in their algorithm. Their ultimate goal is to return the best list of plumbers in the SERPs, not those with the best content.

Google's official stance on linkbait has been positive since they'd much rather see that than outright spam. Behind the scenes, they are finding ways to work around it.

Google's Linkbait Solution

Theoretically, the solution is straight forward. They'll simply assign quality ratings in categories. One for your product, and one for your information. Google's ability to categorize queries is already pretty advanced. It's not much of a leap for them to categorize quality ratings for a website.

This solution would allow a crappy plumber with great linkbait to rank for informational queries, and a good plumber with poor linkbait to rank for transactional queries.

This distinction could be achieved using a careful analysis of different data types. For example, ratings coming from Yelp tend to speak to the transactional value of a company's products, and links to internal pages from blogs would be more likely to speak to the informational value of a website.

Linkbait Isn't Dead

This doesn't mean link bait is dead. Link bait is (and should be) a signal of quality information. Sites with great linkbait should naturally rank for informational queries, and this type of traffic is valuable to marketers looking to fill the top of their funnel.

However, I believe that eventually linkbait will become increasingly ineffective as a strategy for ranking for transactional queries.