Well, it looks like a parody produced supposedly by a link bait expert by the name of Lyndon Antcliff of the Cornwallseo.com fame got around not only the Internet, but a bunch of traditional media. It’s hard to confirm, but if you do a search for the article title, you’ll get tons of posts and articles writing about it throughout the world. This version of the story titled “13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers” in Money.co.uk almost made the story appear real minus the disclaimer.

2 Points: 1) using sex & money in your articles can definitely drive website traffic if done appropriately. 2) link bait SIGNIFICANTLY proves it effectively driving traffic — even Google’s Matt Cutt says link baiting can be good. However, Cutts says he doesn’t like “fake link bait” as indicated in the following:

“Where does Cutt’s and search engines stand on something like this?”
My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this: “Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.” There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax.”

**note: this post didn’t really dwindle down the advice into 2 sentences, but it did summarize it into two points in the middle if you want the meat of this post.