What's a Link from Wired.com Worth?

22 Jan 2007 at 19:04 by Joshua J. Steimle

About 583 visitors so far. On December 13th, 2006 I happened to post on my blog about Best Buy's results-only work environment. On January 18th, 2007 Tony Long, the fightin' Luddite!, saw fit to link to my post via his article When Less is More.

Nevermind that plenty of other people have probably blogged on the same topic that I did, and probably earlier as well. Nevermind that they were probably better writers than I am. Nevermind that it never occurred to me that somebody would link to that post. Somehow Tony found that post (perhaps by performing this search), chose to link to it, and I am now 583 visitors richer.

This is the essence of something called linkbaiting. Creating content that is unique and interesting enough to get other people to link to it. A post I just created called "If the 2008 Elections Were Based on SEO" is an example of linkbait on purpose, as opposed to my Best Buy post which ended up being linkbait accidentally. Aside from the traffic linkbait can draw, there is also the value of the incoming links when it comes to search engine optimization. Every incoming link that is indexed by Google has a value. That value is generally a positive one unless you're getting links from a website Google doesn't like. Links from sites Google adores are worth more than links from sites Google merely likes, all other things being equal, and I would have to guess that Google probably has more than a casual admiration for Wired.com.

SEOmoz's page strength SEO tool gives the page a 6.5 out of 10, but if only it were that easy to calculate the real value but there are so many factors that go into the equation. The number of visitors is one. The effect the link has on the ranking of my blog's page for certain keywords is another. The effect the link might have for my blog as a whole is yet another. And who knows but what that link, having led to an increase in traffic, might lead to yet more links from people who followed that link and return later to read more. In the end it's really impossible. We can guess, and we can approximate, but without an awful amount of work we can't give a definitive answer. But this I can say, I think it's a pretty good link and I wouldn't mind having some more.

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