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6 Things Derek Powazek Taught Us About Linkbait

Note: I meant to post this a few days but forgot, so it’s been sitting as a draft ever since. Better late than never though I guess!

Every now and then the SEO industry as a whole comes under attack from certain individuals, often times due to sheer ignorance, but also occasionally as a means to attract publicity for themselves. The individuals that instigate these attacks are generally so called ‘rock stars’ in their own industries and as such, tend to develop over inflated egos and start to exhibit diva-like tendancies - the perfect ingredients for a grand-scale keyboard fight.

This week it was the turn of some guy called Derek Powazek, who posted an entirely unsavoury and derogative post on his blog entitled Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists.

Dereks diatribe begins by comparing those practicing SEO to “goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen” and continues in it’s inane name-calling by branding us all as “cockroaches”, “bastards” and “jerkwads”.

Isn’t that awesome? I couldn’t have advised him better myself. A perfect execution of the classic attack hook straight out of the link baiting playbook. Bravo, Derek.

I posted a comment on his blog calling out his post as linkbait but he decided not to approve it - although he did acknowledge accusations of linkbait in his followup “SEO FAQ” post.

Why am I convinced that it was a blatant piece of linkbait? Simple - Derek is a clever guy. I don’t buy for one second that he truly believes his “build it and they will come” bullshit. Fact is, you need a marketing mentality to push good content and what is a core part of an online marketers toolset?

You guessed it - SEO.

Afterall, SEO isn’t the only industry with a contingent of evil scumbags out for all they can grab. A national UK home furnishing company I work with on a daily basis recently got charged 500GBP (800USD) by their web development agency to FTP five robots.txt files to various domains they owned. It must have taken those bastard cockroaches all of what? 2 minutes?

Dereks mental seed for the post could, perhaps, also have stemmed from his own past failures. You can bet your ass that at some point in his career, Derek has launched some great new site with all the bells and whistles of a ‘design led’ project - only to find it was utterly beaten in the SERPs by an SEO’d competitor with a shitty looking website. That kind of thing has a habit of pissing you off when you’re on the losing team.

Anyway, moving on - in his followup post he claims that it can’t be linkbait because a) he doesn’t need any work and b) he makes no money from his blog. Hey Derek, news flash! the best time to market yourself is when you’re doing well and sitting high and dry - if you wait until the bad times then you’ve left it too late. But hey, you already know that, right?

It also never hurts to promote your industry while dissing a competitor industry where you feel money is being syphoned away to - and constantly mentioning that you’re an “expert” in your chosen field with over a decade of experience can’t hurt either, right?

I could go on, but let’s instead just recap on the finer takeaway points of this whole saga:

1. You picked your hook now stick with it, do not divert from your angle no matter what the cost.
2. Start as you mean to go on, ie: start your attack in your title.
3. Pick a large target audience - in order to get traction you need to offend a lot of people very quickly. An entire industry works well.
4. Litter your post with intentional innacuracies, generalisations and downright lies. Your target audience will pick up on them and feel compelled to shoot you down.
5. Intentionally fail to approve key comments from your target audience. This will piss them off even more and they’ll probably write an entire blog post about you just to get their opinion heard. Extra marks if they’re a ‘rock star’ of your target industry.
6. Quickly followup your linkbait with a second post incorporating the high volume generic keywords of your target industry - you may pick up some residual long-tail traffic as well as pull in some extra links.