Getting links on competitor's blog
-
An SEO agency I'm working with has asked if we're okay with guest posting on a competitor's blog. What are the negatives of getting a link from a competitor's blog?
Two things I thought of:
-
They can remove the link at any time - why wouldn't you as a competitor?
-
I generally don't want to alert my competition what I'm doing for SEO and how I'm doing it.
Is that enough to not pursue those links? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
-
-
I can also approach this a different way: Would you ever link to your competitors? Would a good piece of content for your blog or site be worth giving them a link?
-
As long as they are not going to delete your link you are good, but that's a risk you will have to take if you go through with it.
IMO it's better to post the article on your own blog and look for relevant media outlets to share it. Why give your valuable content to another competing site? Sure you can get one link your site as a reference, but why not be the reference that they link to naturally.
-
Unless you have an established relationship with the competitor and you're communicating to them directly, and you're the one discussing the guest post with them, and there is discussion and understanding between the both of you of what value you each should get of of this guest post arrangement, I wouldn't do it. In the end, it's not going to be worth anyone's time.
-
The agency's incentive is to post the content on a good, relevant site - so a competitor's blog technically meets that criteria.
The competitor's incentive is to get more content on their site and add internal links to the post for their own site.
-
Guest posting can be beneficial, however you are right about getting a post on a competitors site, they can remove your link at any time and they will learn your strategy. I would look for a similar niche rather then a direct competitor.. ie if your site is selling funny t-shirts you can guest post on humer sites...
The SEO agency that you are working with, what is their incentive? Do they want anything in exchange for the blog post?
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
-
Subdomain and Domain Linking Strategy
Here is my question for SEO. We are a mug printing company and we have a website specifically for bulk orders hosted at our main link (example.com). For the purposes of this example we will assume that we only print mugs for bands. Eg. orders for 100 mugs at a time for a band. We have had a need to create stores for bands so that they can then pass a link to their fans to purchase mugs. Our main website deals specifically with bulk orders only with customer provided logos, so extending this workflow to our main domain takes quite a bit of development time. Because of this, we purchased a service that allows us to create stores under the new domain stores.example.com. The root domain is the same as our main domain but there is “stores” in front of the domain. A band’s website that we would create would then look something like : stores.example.com/band1_merchandise These links are going to be spread by the band all over the web, and it is in my hope to be able to take advantage of this. Ideally stores.example.com/band1_merchandise being spread around will also give us a boost to www.example.com My question is how can we benefit the most from bands sharing the subdomain link such that our main website will be able to see an SEO benefit.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | masonwong0 -
Back links to pages on our site that don't exist on forums we haven't used with irrelevant product anchor text
Hi, I have a recurring issue that I can't find a reason for. I have a website that has over 7k backlinks that I monitor quite closely. Each month there are additional links on third party forums that have no relevance to the site or subject matter that are as a result toxic. Our clients site is a training site yet these links are appearing on third party sites like http://das-forum-der-musik.de/mineforum/ and have anchor text with "UGG boots for sale" to pages on our url listed as /mensuggboots.html that obviously don't exist. Each month, I try to contact the site owners and then I add them to Google using the disavow tool. Two months later they are gone and then are replaced with new backlinks on a number of different forum websites. Quite random but always relating to UGG boots. There are at least 100 extra links each month. Can anyone suggest why this is happening? Has anyone seen this kind of activity before? Is it possibly black hat SEO being performed by a competitor? I just don't understand why our URL is listed. To be fair, there are other websites linked to using the same terms that aren't ours and are also of a different theme so I don't understand what the "spammer" is trying to achieve. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rufo
KInd Regards
Steve0 -
Weird Links Should I Disavow?
I have noticed some weird backlinks in Google Search console and Referals for Google Analytics. For example a reddit page I have never commented on or been on has referred over 900 visitors. The page has no relevance to my site whatsoever, when I check the source code I cannot see the link, so perhaps its been removed. Also seeing links in Google Search Console from sites that are just domain name for sale type pages, and sites/pages that don't seem to exist anymore, or which redirect to others. All of these links have disappeared as well, nothing in source code . And numerous pages that used to link to 404's on my site, many domain name for sale type pages, another which makes my bitdefender plugin go crazy. And seeing common referral patterns in Google Analytics, i.e. numerous /try.php pages on different domains that presumably used to link back but which now redirect to another site. I cannot say there are thousands of these, but I guess they are causing more harm than good. My instinct is to I go through all the links I can and disavow, the link types described above, but am I safe to do so? And is it a good idea or a waste of my time? NB: I haven't built any of them.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GrouchyKids1 -
Buying links - where is the line drawn?
I apologise in advance if this has been discussed before, but I'm a bit confused by this whole buying links/outreach scenario. Example.. High ranking PR site (PR 85) has people advertising they can get you links from that site in exchange for money.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nick-name123
You would give them an article and it would look natural and a link - branded or keyword - links back to you. This is not new to people here who know of this. Obviously there is a difference between a link farm (crap site just selling links) and one of these highly recognised sites where you can obtain a link from. I'm sure a goody 2 shoes will now tell me 'i should do everything natural not be tempted', but I actually dont know where the line is drawn between the same site giving a natural link to me and someone selling a link from the same site. Google isnt going to downgrade the site I'm sure but how do they combat this or even do they combat it? Do we have to accept that buying links is still a normal process and if done in moderation and discretely, you can get away with it?1 -
How authentic is a dynamic footer from bots' perspective?
I have a very meta level question. Well, I was working on dynamic footer for the website: http://www.askme.com/, you can check the same in the footer. Now, if you refresh this page and check the content, you'll be able to see a different combination of the links in every section. I'm calling it a dynamic footer here, as the values are absolutely dynamic in this case. **Why are we doing this? **For every section in the footer, we have X number of links, but we can show only 25 links in each section. Here, the value of X can be greater than 25 as well (let's say X=50). So, I'm randomizing the list of entries I have for a section and then picking 25 elements from it i.e random 25 elements from the list of entries every time you're refreshing the page. Benefits from SEO perspective? This will help me exposing all the URLs to bots (in multiple crawls) and will add page freshness element as well. **What's the problem, if it is? **I'm wondering how bots will treat this as, at any time bot might see us showing different content to bots and something else to users. Will bot consider this as cloaking (a black hat technique)? Or, bots won't consider it as a black hat technique as I'm refreshing the data every single time, even if its bot who's hitting me consecutively twice to understand what I'm doing.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _nitman0 -
Hiding content or links in responsive design
Hi, I found a lot of information about responsive design and SEO, mostly theories no real experiment and I'd like to find a clear answer if someone tested that. Google says:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NurunMTL
Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details For usability reasons sometimes you need to hide content or links completely (not accessible at all by the visitor) on your page for small resolutions (mobile) using CSS ("visibility:hidden" or "display:none") Is this counted as hidden content and could penalize your site or not? What do you guys do when you create responsive design websites? Thanks! GaB0 -
Removing Unnatural Link Penalties
As soon as I began working in my current position at my current company I noticed my predecessor's tendency towards buying link packages from blackhat companies... I knew we were being penalized, and had to prove to him that we needed to halt those campaigns immediately and try our darndest to remove all poison links from the internet. I did convince him and began the process. There was 57% of our backlinks tied to the same anchor phrase with 836 domains linking to the same phrase, same page. Today there are 643 of those links remaining. So I have hit a large number of them, but not nearly enough. So now I am getting messages from Google announcing that our site has been hit with an unnatural link penalty. I haven't really seen the results of this yet in the keywords I am trying to rank for, but fear it will hurt very soon and know that I could be doing better in the meantime. I really don't know what to do next. I've tried the whole "contact the webmasters" technique and maybe have had 1/100 agree to remove our links. They all want money or don't respond.. Do I really need to use this Disavow tool?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jesse-landry
I hear mixed things about it.. Anybody with experience here like to share their stories? Thanks for the moral support!0 -
How do I place the product link on my blog?
I have a shop and also a blog where I explain better the products on the site, such as: how to use, tips, recipes and more. How do I place the product link on my blog? Should I put a link with nofollow? Should not I put link? To put the link anchor text or just put the page URL? Don’t I need to worry about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0
