Recently a high-profile example of what many would call unethical SEO practice stirred up some controversy. A blog posting (titled When Linkbait goes MENTAL!!!), by Lyndon of CornwallSEO, bragged about how Lyndon was able to dupe several news outlets to report on a fake story that he created.

The story ran in credit card site, money.co.uk, the UK Sun tabloid, BBC’s Radio One and was discussed on Fox News (see below).

Lyndon’s stated purpose for the article was to fabricate a story in order to get inbound links. Lyndon said:

…none of it is true, it’s a completely made up yarn. How do I know? I wrote it. It’s what I do for a living. I write content for websites which creates a buzz and hopefully gets links and people to the intended target.

The story was specifically crafted to appeal to the online crowd and included a number of “hot buttons” which resonated with people of a certain mindset.

Pandering to prejudices? Absolutely.

The intention was to create something so unbelievably magnetic that people had to pass it on and tell others in the form of linking to it, sticking it on their TV show, printing it up, and chatting about it on a radio show.

Did I know the story was going to be this big? No of course not, but it is what I aim for. Whether or not a piece of content goes viral is not up to me. The factors which decided the success of such a thing are too numerous to quantify and compute.

Not surprisingly, many left comments pointing out the ethical problems with this linkbait method. The surprising thing for me was how many encouraging comments there were.

What are your thoughts? Is creating fake news stories as unethical as I believe it is, or does the profit motive justify any tactic?