Rick Rolling your way to more links

A few months ago a humorous online prank evolved known as Rick Rolling. The basic premise behind the prank is to trick people into clicking a link of a Rick Astley video by using deceptive anchor text.

For example, here’s the best link bait article you’ll see all year!

By nature I’m a prankster and like to have fun with most things I do, which you can probably tell that by some of the stuff I’ve written (no, that isn’t a Rick Roll). So when I stumbled across this technique my brain started ticking…

How can a prank like this be used to attract links?

By nature, people always like a laugh and often will link to things they find humorous. If you can create a very entertaining Rick Roll page or even a page that contains something humorous that you think your subscribers would fall off their chair reading – they will link to it.

Ok, so now you’ve scored a bucket load of free links…

How can I benefit from a bunch of links pointing to a prank page?

That’s where our friend the 301 redirect comes in. You can take-down the content on the prank page and redirect all traffic, links and rank using a 301 redirect. If you want to read more about how this concept works, have a look at some of these posts:

• ‘Move it’ doesn’t have to mean ‘lose it’
• Got Several Domains? 301 Redirect them to Your Main Domain
• Hey Google, I’m Over Here! (a 301 Experiment)
• Guide to Applying 301 Redirects with Apache
• How to: Move a Website…Should You Fear 301 Redirects Hurting Your Rankings?

So now you should have a bunch of new links from places that may not have previously linked to you and if your prank page was really good you’ll probably gain more traffic thanks to the viral nature of social media.

Plus you can get a chuckle when reviewing your site’s statistics to see how many people ended-up being Rick Rolled!