link bait

I was chatting to someone about creative link building and this example came up.
They wanted to create more World Cup focused traffic during the World Cup, but it’s a pricy time to buy search traffic. They came up with a plan to create the “Anti- World Cup Association”- women who feel abandoned by their husbands and boyfriends during the World Cup and wanted to protest again it. They created a page, sent some pretty girls with t-shirts and banners down to where the Dutch team was training to stage a protest. “Coincidentally” there was a lot of press covering the team, and their story got picked up and was syndicated worldwide. The result; they got a huge volume of links, and correspondingly rose in the natural search rankings. Clever, fun and effective. One caveat is that Google normally penalizes significant increases in links over a short time period, however if they come from news, then its OK.