How do you tell people who don't want to hear it too stop the madness? Top lists are the pits. I know that nearly every internet marketer alive has read a top list for creating linkbait and I guarantee that the top list encouraged told them to create a top list of their own.

The truth is top lists have become over saturated as a product and are also now viewed mostly as watered down content. Is a single sentence or two really all that useful? These days most top lists don't even link to another resource that can assist a reader in learning more. In fact top lists have become so prevalent yet so intellectually useless that I am surprised that more users haven't tuned out already, or have they?

"I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful "bait" for links. And generating information or ideas that people talk about is a surefire way to generate links."

This is a quote from the Google engineer Matt Cutts when discussing linkbait on his blog.

Now before we get too far into this conversation, I have to come clean, I have used this technique before when authoring articles for other blogs. You can find an example of my thoughtlessness here: 10 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Viral Marketing Campaign. The point being, even I wasn't immune to being attracted to writing a top 10 list about someone else's top 10 list. Many other popular authors have also referenced the use of top lists when suggesting ways to create linkbait. See Seth Godin and the SEOmoz blog just to name two. Many others have also used top lists successfully as linkbait and most likely will continue to do so until those lists no longer generate a return.

Here is the thing about this technique. A top list written by Robert Scoble, such as this one here: Top 10 Facebook Apps, will work better and be of greater value to Robert than it would have been to you or I because Robert sits near the top of the blogging world and has an audience of tens of thousands or more on a daily basis. Had you or I written an article similar to this, I can almost guarantee it would have been a failure from a linkbaiting perspective.

Ten items each with a single sentence or two about them, no links to actually go get the applications being referenced, and a single sentence asking his audience which apps they like. For Robert this post was successful on multiple levels, he was able to get a link back from TechCrunch.com, links from a few hundred sources, and probably more important to Robert, feedback from his audience on potential apps he might be missing. For you or I it would have been a colossal flop and here is why.

Odds are you and I aren't "A" list bloggers so the chances of getting a link from a resource like TechCrunch.com are slim, okay call it none, since the TechCrunch.com authors would have probably missed our list or had they seen it, probably concluded our audience wasn't large enough to be worth linking back too. The odds that we would have a distribution or audience the size of Robert's is also slim so we would most likely only generate an extremely small percentage of the overall links Robert did and Robert didn't get all that many links. Finally if we wrote our article purely as linkbait the actually usefulness of the feedback is most likely not something we would see as overly valuable.

So if I am telling you it won't work why do so many individuals keep writing top lists? I believe the answer is pretty basic. Most top lists will generate a link or even three and they require minimal effort for that tiny return. Top lists are simple to produce as they usually consist of an amalgamation of ideas that have already been poked, prodded, and debated to death. When something is really easy to produce like a top list individuals will continue to generate them until they actually achieve a negative return and unfortunately I still think we are still just a bit short of reaching that point. Still I think we will get there quickly. I believe Eric Lander may have said it best.

"Similarly, the more linkbait is tried, the more tiring unoriginal ideas become. I think this sums up part of the problem, there is a serious lack of originality to top lists in most cases."

Finally just to top off this post, I will pull an item from my favorite top 10 list entitled Top 10 lists suck!

1. Fast food blogging
"I once heard a comedian compare KFC to porn… you enjoy it in the moment, but afterwards you feel all dirty and greasy. Top 10 lists are the KFC of the blogging world to me. Mass produced and not terribly good for you. In fact… they'll probably make you fat. A handful of bloggers still manage to come up with insightful Top 10 lists. However, most are simply re-hashing old ideas for the masses."

I felt obligated to reference this list because the idea of Fast Food blogging seemed to resonate as the ultimate description of what top lists have become.