Link Bait and ‘link baiting’ are used to describe content deliberately created and targeted to attract links from other websites.

Webmasters have always tried to create content that attracts visitors (and therefore links since many visitors are other webmasters) but the popularity of social sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace and YouTube, and the millions of blogs, has made it easier to reach large groups of people with specially designed content.

The content can be a controversial, informative or current article, a game, a joke, a download, a video, or an online tool. Anything that another webmaster might find useful and compelling enough to link to.

Some link bait (such as tools and scripts) automatically generate a link back to the site that provides it just because it is used.

A niche directory is a good place to list your site, if you can find one that is relevant. Not only will it provide a more authoritative backlink but it may also send you some traffic, since it will be frequented by others in that niche.

This is especially true for ‘directories of directories’ – what better place is there to find visitors who are prepared to submit to directories?!

It is worthwhile writing a description specifically aimed at attracting others in the niche when submitting to a specialised directory. In the directories niche for example, you might include more technical information that directory owners will appreciate such as mentioning the age of the domain or the PageRank of the site.

Web Directory List is a well designed bid for position directory offering listings for other web directories. An great extra feature is that it offers 5 deep links on a detail page, something that I’ve not seen in bidding directories before.

It will be interesting to see if more bidding directories appear in other niches. It could be that the only people who will pay to be in the top position are webmasters in the SEO and online promotion niche.

One of the problems with web directories can be the PageRank of internal pages – or rather the lack of it.

Directories are often advertised with reference to a high home PageRank but there is little point paying for a listing if the internal page it is on is not crawled or cached by the search engines.

Link Book Web Directory is an interesting example where the home page has a lower PageRank than the internal pages – it is PR4 and many of it’s categories are PR6. That makes it pretty good value at $34.99 for a featured listing, especially as it offers 10 extra deeplinks on the details page.

A quick way to check the PageRank of the internal pages of a directory is to use iWebtool.com visual pagerank checker. This will quickly display the PageRank of the destinations of all links on a page.

‘Bidding’ or ‘Bid for Position’ directories are the latest way to buy high PR links to your site. They usually have the normal directory category structure (though without subcategories) but they allow you to pay more so your listing appears above all the others in your category.

What has made these directories really popular (and profitable) is that the top ten bids are shown on the home page and some also have a ‘top bids’ page where the top twenty bidders are listed or have the top bidder listed on every page. So, by bidding more you can take advantage of the high PageRank of the home page. (Once a site is accepted, additional bids are accepted automatically).

One of the top bidding directories is Big Web Links Directory. It has a home PageRank of 7 and the top bid is $2000 (in total the home page is worth about $11000 at the time of writing). If this level of bidding is out of your range, the minimum bid is $49.90 which is pretty good value for a permanent PageRank 5 link. (Not all the directory categories have high PageRank, the Entertainment Category is one with PR 5).

I have a couple of misgivings about these types of sites. One is, as paid links go these are pretty easy for the search engines to detect, so will they be devalued? The second is, unscrupulous webmasters might artificially increase the bids. So, it is worth being a little cautious with the newer, less well-established bidding directories.

A selection of these sites can be found in the bidding directories page of the SEO Directory.

An important indicator of a good quality web directory is whether it sells site-wide links (links to external sites that are repeated on every page, usually in the footer or sidebar).

A powerful link to your site is one that is relevant – from a unique page covering the same theme as your site, with text including related keywords and linking to other similar sites. This is the type of link that is worth paying for in a directory.

However, the value of a directory listing is diluted if there are completely unrelated links on the same page as the link to your site. And, because they are repeated on every page, site-wide links make every page look similar, so they can end up in the supplemental index.

eWebPages.org is a quality paid web directory that has no site-wides, not even the extremely common ‘Template sponsored by…’ or ‘Powered by PHP Link Directory’ footer links. It also has high PR on all its internal pages (PR 6 home page), even down to the third level categories (e.g. the Web Directories > Niche Directories > Entertainment Directories category is PR 4).

They charge an annual review fee, which is quite expensive, but worth it for the quality of the link back.