gov.palin@yahoo.com

You may have read or heard about link baiting before, this is a fine art and is very lucrative when carried out correctly, another similar form is Bot baiting, yes it exists - gov.palin@yahoo.com - is an example of a Bot bait attempt and post - hence the title of this post.

Before I delve into the details, I will give a few more examples of link baiting, you may have read the Miley Cyrus is dead type news and hoaxes, these are your typical link baiting attempts, it works simple - you create a site or page based on the hoax, this creates a jump on the competition, then you attempt to spread the news via popular sites like Digg, Yahoo answers and so on - in the hope that the gossip gets around quickly - shortly after this hoax is played out the word may spread and this results in a surge of people searching for Miley Cyrus is Dead …. then hopefully your link is within the top results in Google - resulting in lots of traffic, if you use a long tail key search / hoax phrase your success can be multiplied, for example you may use “Miley Cyrus Car Accident” instead of Miley Cyrus dead.

OK, now Bot baiting is similar in approach and marketing, but doesn’t require as much effort as link baiting and the traffic can be just as rewarding, some popular sites are typical targets and these include Youtube, Digg and Google Trends - which is less saturated.

Some examples of bot baiting are the Youtube keyword stuffers, these are those spammy Youtube videos that include 500 random (key) words within the description - which are un-related to the videos content. The simple idea is to get bots/sites to grab the videos and embed them into a web site - like auto video galleries, then the video will also have a link within the description which is also included into the bot / video grabbers web site.

Bots are very popular in grabbing content from popular web sites, also known as scrapers, even RSS feeds, then they include the gathered data within a web site, the web site is normally on automatic and gathers the content with little interaction from the web master.

This post is typical of a Google Trends bot bait post - I will go into depth with a new post.