Neil Patel on the Hyperlink Hot Seat

I’d like to think I’m a pretty slick link baiter, but I know when I’m overmatched, and I am vs. Neil Patel. Luckily he’s agreed to sit on the hot seat and give us some tips.

I know you get a lot of stuff on the Digg homepage. In your experience, how much traffic does a normal digg-homepage-story send?

The traffic that Digg drives when a story gets on the homepage can vary quite a bit depending on when it hits the homepage. I have had stories that got on the homepage in the middle of the night with over 2000 diggs which received roughly 3000 visitors from Digg and I have had stories with fewer than 1000 diggs that hit the homepage during the middle of the day that receive more than 10000 visitors from Digg. But usually if a story hits the homepage around 11 am to 2 pm PST it usually drives 5000 to 10000 visitors. If a story hits the homepage at night or during non-peak hours it usually drives 2000 to 6000 visitors.

What do you think about link baiting? Is it the most powerful SEO tactic right now? Should everyone be doing it? Or is it just a fad?

I think link baiting is the most powerful SEO tactic right now. You can get links through other tactics such as reciprocal linking and purchasing text links, but link baiting is the quickest and most efficient way to get natural links coming into a website. And with all of the social sites growing at a rapid pace such as Digg, del.icio.us, Netscape and StumbleUpon I think we will see more people trying to leverage them for links.

At the current moment tech sites are using link baiting more then non-tech related sites.  Non-tech industries have not been using link baiting practices as much because it takes more creativity thus making it more difficult in those sectors. After Netscape was released and Digg expanded into non tech related categories, the non-tech sectors are beginning to use link baiting techniques a lot more.  Due to the expansion of these social sites and the acceptance the idea of âsocial newsâ, I think everyone who is looking to increase their search engine traffic should give link baiting a try.

You guys always seem to have a new awesome web app coming out every month or so Anything in the pipeline LBB readers should be aware of?

At the current moment we are working on two projects that have not been released yet.  The first is called Serph and the second is called Siteblimp. Serph is going to be a âsearch engine for nowâ that lets you see/track all the latest stuff that is happening to you, a specific product or really anything.  Serph was conceived out of our need for an easy to use âbuzz trackerâ. Siteblimp on the other hand is a pay-per-click management application that lets people manage their Google AdWords campaign with ease.

I know the Digg "algo" has had some major changes in the last couple weeks. How do you think these changes affected the Digg community?

For the last few months getting any story on Digg was easy because of the âdigg friendsâ feature. If you needed 30 or so diggs before a story hits the front page, it was not too hard to get 20 or so of those diggs from all your digg friends. With the algorithm update Digg has made it a little harder to get on Digg, which has affected a lot of the top diggers or users with a lot of digg friends.  Some were so frustrated with the change they stopped digging and left to other sites such as Netscape and Reddit. But overall this change affected the community in a positive way because now, a larger amount of higher quality stories seem to be appearing on the homepage, versus lower quality ones.

Lastly, you run a very successful web company and attend school full time, simultaneously. I hope you still get some quality party-time in?

Every once in a while I get some quality party-time in, but most of the time I donât. There is not enough time in a day to work, go to school full time and still have fun, so I just stick to working and school. Hopefully when I finish school within a year things will change, but knowing me I will just spend more time working. I really enjoy what I do, so most of the time, party-time is work-time.

Thanks Neil!