We’ve been doing some research on link baiting via social media and we need your help!
Jay Feitlinger posted a thread on Parentsconnect.com (currently not our client) asking for advice when his four year old asked him “is Santa real?” Since then he’s gotten 14 answers from the community.
A quick search in Google for “is Santa real” shows several blog posts, forum threads and comments that feature that phrase, however our particular post doesn’t appear. We’re not surprised that it’s not showing up because the page itself is not organically optimized – which is why it’s perfect for our experiment. We wanted to run an experiment to see how many optimized links it would take to get Jay’s post on ParentsConnect.com into the top ranking results for that phrase.
Hypothesis: We think we need at least 100 links to this URL with the text “is Santa real” in order to see our post within the top 50 rankings.
Method: We’re asking you, yes YOU, to write a little snippet about this experiment in your blog, on a forum, or anywhere that doesn’t have a no-follow policy and hyperlink the phrase “is Santa real” to Jay’s comment on ParentsConnect.com .
Results: We’ll track the number of links to this post on daily basis and run ranking reports so we can compare the number of links we have against the ranking we’ve achieved to pinpoint how many links it takes to increase our ranking. We’ll post our data and results for all of you to see and use.
To participate, link the phrase “is Santa real” to http://www.parentsconnect.com/preschooler/chat_it_up_thread.jhtml?tID=36119 or just copy and paste the following hyperlinked code into your blog, forum, comment, or wherever!
<a href=”http://www.parentsconnect.com/preschooler/chat_it_up_thread.jhtml?tID=36119″>is Santa real</a> ?
You can also drop us a line in the comment box letting us know where you’ve posted and what your hypothesis is - if you have any other ideas of what we can do to make this work, let us know!
Thanks everyone!
*Note: make sure to avoid using sites that have NoFollow tags such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter (But feel free to promote our experiment on any or all of those sites!)
Link Baiting Experiment - Is Santa Real? | at 10:57am on November 18th, 2008
[…] is a link to the Sitewire blog, talking about the […]
Katie V at 1:15pm on November 18th, 2008
As of 12:30 pm we’ve made page 6 of Google!
Katie V at 1:23pm on November 18th, 2008
You can digg the story here!
http://digg.com/people/Is_Santa_Real_Parent_s_Connect_Discussion#
Stephen Kelley at 1:20pm on November 19th, 2008
I’m in, you’ve got a link on the Hawthorne Direct blog: http://www.hawthorneblog.com/content/social-media-experiment-link-baiting
It would be interesting to see some graphs of links, Google page rank of pages with links, Google rank of target over time. The tough thing is accounting for the time delay between new links and rise in the target Google rank. Oh well, measure what you can.
Katie V at 1:36pm on November 19th, 2008
Stephen, Thank you!
In a few days we will post a graph with how the rankings have increased compared to the links. I’ll send you a message when that happens and you can check it out.
Thanks again!
Katie V at 9:10am on November 20th, 2008
We’re now on page 4 of Google! Let’s see how far we can take this. We’re shooting for page 2…
Results will be posted on Monday.
Sitewire Santa Wants Stocking Full Of Links This Holiday Season « Critic(al) Mass at 10:49pm on November 24th, 2008
[…] Blogonawire post invites us all to lend a hand by participating, and provides simple instructions for doing […]
The Spirit of Christmas is Sharing | Katie’s Adventures at 8:03am on November 25th, 2008
[…] Santa Real” on the Parent’s Connect forum. Since then we’ve been conducting a little social experiment to see how far we can move it up the Google rankings just by linking that phrase across the […]
blogonawire | Social Media Experiment Results: Link Baiting at 4:42pm on November 25th, 2008
[…] been a little over a week since we asked you all to help us with our social media experiment* to help us move Jay’s post on ParentsConnect.com to page 1 of Google […]
Is Santa Real - Social Linking Experiment Results | Katie’s Adventures at 5:47pm on November 25th, 2008
[…] been a little over a week since Sitewire and I asked you all to help us with our social media experiment* to help us move Jay’s post on ParentsConnect.com to page 1 of Google […]