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A quick note to point out to readers that money.co.uk has put up a formal apology on their website for promoting fabricated news. Also, the original page containing the offending article has had a full disclaimer added.

I mentioned early in the debate on one of the myriad threads that no one knows what money.co.uk's stance on all this is. I suspected for a while that they were unaware of the extent of the fraud perpetrated in their name. This apology goes some way to confirming that suspicion.

The fact that money.co.uk saw this event as a major dent in the trust of their website confirms what a lot of people have been saying over the past few days. As I said only yesterday, hoaxes and lies may gain dividends in the short term, but in the long run inevitably result in a negative backlash. In this case, the SEM in question has had their reputation dented and lost a contract as well as sending the client website into damage control.

After last Friday’s post discussing the issue of fabricated link-bait, I thought I had said everything I needed to on the topic. No one was more surprised than me to see the debate rage on and on over the last seven days, with a number of arguments put forward on both sides.

It quickly became apparent that for many, the problem wasn’t merely the fabrication of news for link-bait, but the large number of SEM professionals that applauded the development.

Throughout all the blog posts and forums and Twitter chats, a few questions or statements have come back again and again, creating new questions and new areas of debate. Therefore, I thought it necessary to explore some of this fallout to try to answer the question of whether hoaxing is a valuable online marketing technique or a worrying nail in the coffin of online credibility.

Good linkbait is the holy grail of online marketing. The right post or web article can spread through social media sites, or sometimes mainstream news sites, to point potentially hundreds of valuable links back to you.

But what is the ‘right’ article and is it ‘anything goes’ to create a story that captures the web?

Start Spreading the News

Online marketer Lyndon Antcliff recently helped a client achieve over 1500 inbound links in under a week with a story designed to grab attention.

The article - 13 Year Old Steals Dad's Credit Card to Buy Hookers – appeared on money.co.uk as part of Lyndon’s linkbaiting campaign, and it was certainly successful.

But the whole article was fiction.

Yes, after holding out and dismissing Twitter as a fad, I've finally relented and started my account.

Personally, I just didn't get it before. Warren Ellis first write about Twitter way back before it was leaped upon as the darling of the online marketing circuit, but a brief investigation convinced me that it was as unnecessary distraction.

With more and more blog posts appearing extolling the virtues of Twitter, I became interested again, but still cynical. After all, do I really want to add another intrusive social media past-time into my already cramped day?

But as more bloggers I admire sign up and evangelise, I'm beginning to feel there is a greater risk of being left behind.

The final nail in my cynicism was Patrick Altoft's post on Blogstorm this morning that explained how Twitter serves as a secondary subscription feed - driving traffic through to the site.