Your question is “How is link magnet different from linkbait?” Well, Let’s discuss.

Webpages all over the internet refer a user to other pages through a link. These links could be to some other website or to the pages on the same website. The cause for providing a link could be many such as promotion, subscription, advertising, reference or further reading etc.

The internet contains millions of websites of almost every variety under the sun. Among them, some of the websites have authority, reputation and credibility in their respective fields.

If these prominent websites refers its visitors to other websites through a link then the referred website also gains credibility in the eyes of the users.

Search Engines also such ‘referred’ websites as important and gives them better rankings in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages); keeping in mind other factors as well to rank pages.

It is important that the links to our website, i.e. backlinks (which are links from other websites to the pages of our website) be earned naturally.

Some people try to game the system and use techniques such as link-buying, spam-techniques etc to increase their backlinks. But these dubious strategies are penalised by Search Engines, and only pages with organic traffic and links get better rankings in SERP.

It is in the aforementioned context, link bait and link magnet has been explained as follows.

What is linkbait?

The word bait means a lure so as to attract attention. Link-bait involves providing valuable and high-quality content on our website which may cause other websites to naturally refer/link our website. The other websites would want to do this without us asking for it. They find the content so worthwhile they cannot resist referring it.

The linkable content can be anything, i.e. it can be tourist guide, popular song video, good collection of stories, analysis of a variety of content, research project etc.

The only thing is that the websites hosting such linkable content seem relevant to other related websites that they feel inclined to refer to it. This is done in order to increase the worth of the content on their websites too.

As already discussed, backlinks also play a role in determining a website’s ranking on the SERP. Due to link-bait, a website’s rank may improve.

This is because other websites see the linked website as an authority in their respective field, with original and credible information. Link-bait has been undermined so far, but if used with a correct strategy, it can increase a website’s ranking.

Also, Link-bait help in gaining more traffic from an organic search.

What is link magnet?

For a long time link-bait has been in the vogue. But link-magnet pushes the concept a little bit more ahead. It also helps in gaining links for a website as did link-bait, but it doesn’t rely on the hope that other people may find our website’s content attractive or compelling enough to refer it. Rather, it provides people with various incentives so that they link our website.

These various incentives in the case of link-magnet can be a spectrum of things. For instance, one might create a content which tells about the top ten restaurants in a locality.

Then those restaurants could be contacted and told that they each have won trust of customers in particular regional dishes in an extensive consumer survey.

Then the websites of these restaurants have an incentive to provide a reference or link to our content. Also, they would proudly show the survey’s result to its customers to gain their trust.

Link magnet strategies, however, should not contain financial incentives or anything which might about to buying links or some kind of quid pro quo. If financial incentives or link exchanges are involved then those links might not be relevant or might not help build organic traffic.

To summarize, link magnets and link-bait both are link building strategies. The only difference is the way they approach to acquire links. Link-bait focuses more on compelling content so as to attract potential references while link-magnet focuses on aggressive incentives or incentive campaigns so as attract references.