I am a reader of the Alledia Blog and I highly recommend other webmasters to as well. They recently wrote a post concerning Linkbait and about a quote that Aaron Wall gave on his blog SEO Book concerning link-baiting and the potential lack of long term results it will give you in Google. Here is the quote:

“Most people coming to your site from linkbait have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever … Google is looking at how natural a site’s link growth profile looks like, and discounting many of the rapid growth spikes if they are not followed up by an increased baseline link growth rate … Compare linkbait to developing a real brand. Developing a real brand is slower and more expensive, but search is intrinsically tied to branding. If your brand is the keyword, it is hard for search engineers to take it away from you. They are irrelevant if they do not show you at the top of the results … as you build brand awareness, it causes a smooth natural link growth profile, which helps you rank better for the generic phrases.”

To many “black hat SEO” people out there this quote may be discouraging. But the “white hat SEO” people this is acceptable and there is room to work with it. My feelings are that it’s only about time that Google begins to adopt such principals into their algorithm to help continue to keep away the “spam” and keep the deserving websites on the SERP’s. My only question to Aaron Wall would be what specifically does he consider to be “brand awareness”? Do you have an example of what you would do specifically to create brand awareness on the web?