Should I link to competitors?
-
Hi, I was wondering: we work in an extremely competitive market. There are 6 companies, offering the same service in my country: price comparison in a niche market. The competitors have hundreds of different websites, using iframe-techniques.
Would it be helpful for me to link to those 6 competitors, in a piece of content about our company strategies, USP's and overview of the market?
From a transparency point of view, i would prefer telling my visitors there are other competitors, which are undoubtedly performing very well, but we perform better on several aspects of the price comparison.
On the other hand, my competitors benefit from the backlinks as well. Is my gain bigger than the gain of my competitors do you think? Has anyone tested this once?
-
what does do not link site-wide means?? You mean i can only link to competitors on my home page?
-
Hi Bart
Here is a nice Whiteboard Friday on "Is External Linking Good For SEO? - Whiteboard Friday".. There is a good discussion on comments regd external links to competitors.
Hope this would helps.
-
Thanks for the answer. You wrote 'From my experience, this is the best practice'. What were your (statistical) findings from linking vs. not linking to competitors? Did it have a positive effect on your website ranking or metrics?
-
You can have 1-2 external links to your competitors, however, use only the official name of their websites as anchor text. Do not link site-wide, only from the homepage.
From my experience, this is the best practice.
It is up to you if you want to use dofollow or nofollow in the href.
-
Yes, you can link to them. It's not like you would be linking to them on a daily basis. As far as I know Google loves it when you link to relevant sites (outgoing links are valuable too). And what's better than competitors in terms of relevancy. And if they notice that you are linking to them, you could be making good connections with them and who knows, they might do the same. Everyone wins in long term.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Back link plan discussion
When you have a lot of keywords that you rank for say something like 15,000 or more. How do you develop a good back link plan? I was thinking to first look at the highest volume keywords we already rank for but aren't in the top 1-3 spots. To focus on those few words trying to obtain more high quality back links. But I'm not sure if this is the best plan . What would you do? What are some good consistent back link plans you can use to work on a keyword or lots of keywords? Thanks for the discussion, Chris
Algorithm Updates | | Cfarcher1 -
What happens if we remove all the links to internal pages from our homepage?
Hi Moz community, We wanna give a try by removing all the links from homepage to internal pages and keep just a free trial button. Will this impact our SEO anyway? We have nearly 15 important internal pages at 2nd and 3rd hierarchy level. They may drop in rankings but we want to risk for few days to understand how it works. Your opinion please! Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How to find keywords competitor is using
I am doing work for a landscaping company and having trouble with finding the best keywords. Most of keywords are so expensive on adwords to use, so obviously we want to optimize as best possible. How do I find what keywords competitors are using for campaigns and/or optimized for? thx.
Algorithm Updates | | SexyLeggings0 -
Why do we have so many pages scanned by bots (over 250,000) and our biggest competitors have about 70,000? Seems like something is very wrong.
We are trying to figure out why last year we had a huge (80%) and sudden (within two days) drop in our google searches. The only "outlier" in our site that we can find is a huge number of pages reported in MOZ as scanned by search engines. Is this a problem? How did we get so many pages reported? What can we do to bring the number of searched pages back to a "normal" level? BT
Algorithm Updates | | achituv0 -
If our link profile is too "blog link" heavy, will that be all that bad?
We own a site that lends itself extremely well to getting boat loads of links, only down side is that those on the boat are all bloggers. We are selling a product that retails for $6.89 per unit. They are for women. Our target market is any woman/girl who is between 14 and 50. Even better, our cost per unit is only about $0.40. So what we've been doing is sending them out by the hundreds to legit fashion blogs all the way down to blogspot mommy bloggers and the reviews have poured in, literally all of them positive. Moral of the story, we have a good product, and no shortage of bloggers that would be willing to write us up a legit, human written (by a red-blooded American none-the-less) on almost exclusively legit blogs. We're not trying to manipulate what they say, how they link to us, what anchor text they use or anything. We're just sending them product, asking that they do a review and give us a link and that's it. Our worry is that given the nature of the site and the product offering, it's going to be easy to get these legit blog links, but more difficult to get links that "aren't on blogs". Is this going to hurt us, or will Big Google be kind and realize this isn't shady manipulation. It's legit part of our ongoing effort to get the word out. Further evidence that our campaign isn't to manipulate (although we all know we're in it for the links) is that so far 75% of our sales have been driven by these reviews. A few of the bigger sites that have done reviews have each directly resulted in 10+ sales from that single review. So what are all ya'll's thoughts? I suspect we'll be OK, but wanted some others to provide their views.
Algorithm Updates | | AarcMediaGroup0 -
I think my inbound link anchor text looks un-natural to google - How to fix?
Hi all, For a bit of back ground see this question i posted recently: http://www.seomoz.org/q/lost-over-65-of-organic-visits-since-sept-please-help From the responses there and looking into my backlinks and my competitors i can see an issue with the anchor text on my inbound links... nearly all keywords and very very few brand names etc... From what i can gather (using open site explorer) the page in question has: 1100 inbound links from 900 domains These use 90 different anchor texts 106 of these links use my brand / website name in the anchor text These 106 links are spread over 18 domains (73 from 1 directory) About 5-10% of the links are from directories, the rest are from what i would describe as "proper websites" From my very limited knowledge of this, the issue is my brand / website should have a far higher ratio of links using it as the anchor text then any keyword... which as you can see from the above is not the case... If it wasnt for that 1 directory there would only be 33 links with my brand from over 1000... I need to start fixing this, but was wondering how to start... Below are a list of options i could try, i have no idea if these would help or hinder, any advice you could give on the potential affects of below options would be very helpful: Options (the below are hypothetical, i have no idea if i will be able to get it done - Just thinking out loud here): Get as many as possible of the "directory" links removed Remove keywords from 50-60% of links and replace with branding Or Try to add branding to 50-60% of the anchor texts something like [Brand] + [keyword] Forget about whats been done previously / changing it will not help in anyway / and focus on branding in anchor text for any future link building? Thanks James
Algorithm Updates | | isntworkdull0 -
Link Deletion - Reputation Management
Hi Team, For our client, Forum thread was created some where in Feb 2011 on a US based Forum site, but on to that forum; client has been abused through comments and now in 2012 same link is on top for some important keyword. So we approached to the forum owner to delete the thread or the comments but we got negative response from owner. So do we have anyway to remove that link completely from Google search result apart from creating new links and bringing them on top so that targeted link is moved to later pages. We need some solution/ trick through which we can completely remove the thread link. Awaiting your reply.
Algorithm Updates | | NevilRohinton340 -
WIll embedding affiliate links from Amazon, commission connection services, and AdSense damage your SEO?
Will having affiliate marketing links and images on your website damage search engine ranking on certain terms? Those affiliate links are just for office tools and online document services and nothing like an adult contents or spamming.
Algorithm Updates | | WebMarketingSmart1