I don’t often go off on rants here at SEOpsCentre.  That’s what Twitter is for.
But I just couldn’t resist the urge to throw my two cents right into the common-sense, middle ground of this.

If you’re a regular at Sphinn there’s no way you could have missed the debate that’s been raging there over the last few days regarding Lyndon Antcliff’s use of a made up story about a teenager hiring hookers to play Xbox games as linkbait for UK financial advice site Money.co.uk.

No-one can argue that Lyndon’s article hasn’t been incredibly successful in terms of generating new links to his client’s site.  A quick check on Yahoo! Site Explorer at the time of writing reveals over 5,000 links pointing to that page alone.

The bone of contention for a lot of other SEOs out there seems to be centred around whether or not it’s ethical to use an outright lie like that as a way of promoting a client’s site, especially a client in the market of providing serious and (hopefully) trustworthy advice to consumers about how to handle their finances.  The worry is that as an article presented without any caveats to indicate that it was just a fictional yarn and because it was picked up as a real piece of news by so many “proper” news outlets like the BBC, Fox News and many others, this could end up damaging Money.co.uk in the minds of consumers as they may come to distrust anything else they read on the site.

This might be a little extreme.  Chances are that in a few weeks the world at large will have forgotten all about little Ralph Hardy and his dad’s credit card.  Almost certainly, most of the extra traffic that spiked to the site in order to read the article was from outside the UK and probably didn’t stick around to check out any other pages on the site or convert into paying customers.

But the links will remain and they will continue to provide a boost to Money.co.uk in the eyes of Google’s link-based ranking algorithm for a long time to come.  And that seems to be the sole measure of success and the basis for Lyndon’s statement, “I have little interest in discussing the ethics of linkbait, as far as I am concerned if it works and results are achieved then do it.”
Considering the fact that the majority of these links will be using the article’s title, “13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers” this will surely have a positive effect on Money.co.uk’s SERP positions for the term “credit card.”  Any additional boost that it gives for the terms “13 year old” or “hookers” will just be regarded as a collateral by-product.

What did Lyndon do wrong?

I’ve got a lot of respect for Lyndon Antcliff.  I regularly read his blog and have found a lot of useful advice on there.  As a fellow Brit, I also appreciate his sense of humour a lot more than some.

Will I stop reading his blog as a result of this debacle?
Hell no!

Do I think he could have handled this situation better?
Well… yes.

As I’ve already mentioned above, there are plenty of opinions going around arguing whether it’s ethical to get links from news outlets for a lie.
Lyndon’s response is that he can’t control who chooses to link to the story and it’s not his fault if they report it as fact without checking whether or not it’s true.

The counter-argument points out that a story presented in this way on a site that is supposed to provide trustworthy financial advice and that isn’t known for (and doesn’t appear to have ever previously posted) “joke” stories, gave the tale an appearance of legitimacy that fooled people into believing it, leading to the story gaining much greater attention than it would have done if it had been posted on a site known for satirical, made up stories, such as The Onion or News Biscuit.
Lyndon’s response was to fall back on the argument that it’s other people’s decisions to link to the story and their fault if they don’t “get” that it’s satire.

On and on it went, becoming a circular debate of “That was naughty,” “No it wasn’t,” back and forth with no-one giving or gaining any ground.
Gradually the debate, in the comments on both Lyndon’s own site and on the Sphinn post of the story, devolved into little more than tit-for-tat name calling, as phrases like “SEO fundamentalists,” “Nigerian email scammers,” and even “Albanian Marxists,” flew back and forth.
Initially, Lyndon appeared to be gaining a perverse pleasure from mocking the “holier than thou” attitude of his opponents, baiting them and inciting less and less productive replies.

Eventually tiring of the developing flame war and realising it was distracting him from getting any actual work done, Lyndon removed his original blog post where he admitted to writing the fictional piece on Money.co.uk.

Lyndon’s big mistake wasn’t writing the article for Money.co.uk in the first place.
It would be naive to think that his clients didn’t have editorial oversight and could have chosen not to publish the story if they weren’t comfortable with having it on their site.

His biggest mistake wasn’t even allowing himself to get embroiled in the bickering, and at times childish, comments on Sphinn and his own blog.
Although that was hardly his, or many other people’s, finest hour.

Lyndon’s big mistake was posting the story on his blog detailing his role in creating this linkbait in the first place.
I can understand why he would be excited and justifiably proud of how successful his work has been.  In the same situation, I’d probably want to shout it from the rooftops as well.  But if the reaction has proven anything it’s that this is not the right way to detail one’s professional successes.
Had this been mentioned as part of a client profile within a portfolio page on his site it would have slipped by largely un-noticed and avoided the negative reactions of so many members of the SEO community, but would have been a far more effective way of illustrating his skills to prospective clients.

Lesson Learned

You rarely, if ever, see SEO bloggers post so openly about the specifics of a campaign that they are conducting for a client.  There are a great many, common sense, reasons for this and the storm that has surrounded Lyndon for the last couple of days serves as a pretty strong reminder of one of these.

It’s all well and good to share abstract tales of techniques that have proven effective.  But disclosing too much regarding a particular client and the work done for them is generally considered to be bad form.  Lyndon surely wasn’t the first SEO to create a fictional story designed with the express intention of attracting links from social media for a client.  He certainly won’t be the last.

The truth of how successful this has been won’t be known for a while, until we can see whether there does end up being a backlash against Money.co.uk, either from consumers losing trust in the site, or from the media outlets who were duped into reporting this fictional story as real news.
But given the reaction that Lyndon has received from a vocal portion of the internet marketing community, he’s unlikely to share too many more details with us in the future.

So perhaps we’ll never know…