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Posted

What is clickbait thread titles?

 

In short it’s essentially a thread title that manipulates the reader into clicking to read or see more. Most of the time it is some nonsensical title.

 

Generally what happens next, the reader is disenchanted by the title having nothing to do with the thread, or not being a correct description of the content, losing both interest and trust from your audience.

 

One of the biggest reasons clickbait thread titles seem so fun to users posting the thread is because of their relatively high success rate at gaining attention. Readers have a natural curiosity, but the views you’re getting through clickbait titles do nothing for a sites long term success.

 

As a matter of fact, clickbait titles hurt your SEO.

 

Any SEOer can tell you that the title is really important to the overall health of your thread This includes searchable keywords and the possibility of showing up as an exact match on search queries. The title does more for your post than simply give readers a preview of the posting

 

Having a clickbait title takes away all that SEO juice you could have been sending to your thread. It tells Google nothing about what you have posted, and more importantly, it misleads people viewing threads on the site. It turns your site into an untrustworthy source, which is going to prevent those new eyes on your page from becoming return readers.

 

Take this as a example from this site. The title of the thread in the below link is Bee Bee Codes.

Bee Bee Codes

 

While it may seem cute, and gets people that are on the site to click on it, it is in no way helping the SEO of the site. Also it is not going to show up on a search result when someone is searching for BBCodes.

 

I would encourage admins to try and steer there members away from using clickbait titles while posting threads. This type of tactic is not going to help your site at all.

 

Now with all that said, if you have a section that is for chit chat, then this sort of thing is fine. It allows members to have some ton on the site. But in all regular forums, this sort of thing should be discouraged against.

 

Thanks for reading. :)

  • Like 1
Posted (edited)
Having a clickbait title takes away all that SEO juice you could have been sending to your thread. It tells Google nothing about what you have posted, and more importantly, it misleads people viewing threads on the site. It turns your site into an untrustworthy source, which is going to prevent those new eyes on your page from becoming return readers.

 

Reminds me of that Empire on TAZ. He seems to do that with a lot of topics he starts. Uses silly over-the-top titles and when you read the topic it has nothing to do with title.

 

Never really thought about click baiting with topic titles used. But it does work for him sometimes because people post replies pointing out the title has nothing to do with topic, so job done I guess. It got replies..

Edited by GTB
Posted
Reminds me of that Empire on TAZ. He seems to do that with a lot of topics he starts. Uses silly over-the-top titles and when you read the topic it has nothing to do with title.

 

Never really thought about click baiting with topic titles used. But it does work for him sometimes because people post replies pointing out the title has nothing to do with topic, so job done I guess. It got replies..

 

But it does nothing for the sites SEO!

Posted
I really believe the whole "SEO" nonsense is just that....

 

You honestly think some idiot is going to search the web for "bee bee codes"? They would have to in order to find the thread.

Posted

Again, I'm not one to believe in all that nonsense.

 

Just a money maker for Google.... people waste too much time and effort on.

 

Just create good content, rest takes care of itself.

Posted (edited)
Thought Google mainly focuses these days on content keywords and pays little attention to title keywords after what's gone on in past with that trying to get high page ranking with title keywords used but little content posted stuffed with ads on a page. They used to call it keyword stuffing the title to get ranked high but google clicked onto to that one done a long time ago. Edited by GTB

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