Link baiting has been around for a fair while now, and we all know the basic concept is essentially driven by self interest, i.e., increasing website traffic for financial or personal gain.

But I have been thinking about the concept from another point of view. The web is an extremely competitive environment to operate a business in or even to disseminate information; hence the SEO industry and the Linkbait have needed to evolve with this competitive environment to remain effective.  This has forced businesses to share more of their information and tools than ever before to remain competitive in this environment.

Remember way back in the 90’s when a well designed forum was a big deal, or a good review attracted attention? Now jump forward to today and forums and review sites number in their millions, and scripts or plugins for setting them up on a website for free are readily available.

All of SEOmoz’s free tools and content can be seen essentially as link bait to attract paying customers. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing; on the contrary, twenty five years ago the quality of resources shared freely on this site would have been unheard of outside a commercial context.

This type of sharing is happening on a huge scale, with high quality free information and tools available to anyone with an internet connection in just about any sector you could name.

Will this trend, which started as self interest, lead ultimately to a culture where open source and freedom of information are the dominant paradigms? I’m not sure but it’s a nice idea.

What do you think?