Extremely Lame

Linkbaiting is a search engine optimization practice in which someone takes a completely onerous stand on something with the intention of pissing a lot of people off and getting a lot of people to link to it so they can show others how wrong this person is. Of course, for the individual that engages in this, it generates large amounts of traffic and thus ad revenue. It’s pretty much the same practice that shock jocks such as Howard Stern and Sean Hannity engage in.

Here’s an a quick how-to/example of linkbaiting.

1. Publish something that’s overwhelmingly obvious. As an example,  quote some person saying that if Obama is the Democratic nominee, then the racists that hate black people will probably vote for the other guy.
2. Write a headline that suggests that what the person is saying is highly incendiary, such as “Obama aide says McCain has the racist vote,” but never actually say those words in the actual article.
3. Profit!

Actually, it’s not exactly a technique solely used by unethical bloggers and shock jocks. The mainstream media has been doing this for years, only for the purposes of scaring people instead of pissing them off. They’ll have a sensationalist headline stating something is dangerous and going to kill us all, yet the actual article contradicts the very thing they claimed in the article because they know that many people only read the headline and maybe the first paragraph or two. It’s deceptive, manipulative, and insulting of the readership. And, unfortunately, it works.