Robert_Charlton - 5:14 am on Dec 14, 2009 (gmt 0)

...Link bait links should count as votes for the content and the quality of the site? Or link bait links are only links to the bait and should not be construed as votes for the quality of the site?

To pick up on the "should" vs "does" aspects of this discussion... Google is big on intention and I'm sure would love to use intention where it can. I think its ability to do so here is iffy at best. For a given search, Google would not only need to be able to discern the intention of the links, but also the intention of the searcher and the intention of the page/site content. This is far beyond what Google appears to be capable of doing.

That said, I wouldn't completely rule out Google differentiations among various linking patterns. In determining whether the links are votes for "quality", eg, the relationship of temporal and (query independent) trust factors may well play a part. A flurry of blog links for one article might be classified very differently than, say, a steady accumulation of links of from different kinds of sources at varying intervals. Link bait links may well have discernible patterns which Google can spot, and this might enable Google to weight them differently from other links. Obviously, all sorts of other factors apply. These might be factors that Google can track now, and/or will soon be able to track or compute more easily with the Caffeine file system in place.

There are also different kinds of queries which Google is tracking now. Queries deserving freshness, eg, might possibly be getting more boost from viral links than queries not requiring freshness.

Matt Cutts wrote a post in 2006 [mattcutts.com] about link bait, expressing approval of good content, like an article, as a form of good link bait....

Obviously Matt isn't going to be divulging secret sauce, but something he comes back to repeatedly is, I feel, central to the secret sauce... or at least to Google's goals regarding the recipe... that, in the long run, sites which work best for users tend to work best for Google.

So, without making distinctions about how Google classifies links, Matt lays out a scenario which suggests that sites based on interesting or useful information are going to win out, simply because they will get more (and perhaps better) link votes over time....

...Personally, I’d lean toward producing interesting data or having a creative idea rather than spouting really controversial ideas 100% of the time. If everything you ever say is controversial, it can be entertaining, but it’s harder to maintain credibility over the long haul.