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 when a de-indexed subdomain is redirected to another de-indexed subdomain? What happens to the link juice?
Hi all, We are planning to de-index and redirect a sub domain A to sub domain B. Consequently we now need to d-index sub domain B also. What happens now to the link juice or page rank they gained from hundreds and thousands of backlinks? Will there be any ranking impact on main domain? Backlinks of these sub domains are not much relevant to main domain content. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Thousands of duplicate website links at "Who links the most" in Google webmasters. Any risk being duplicate website links pointing to website?
Hi all, As I mentioned some days back here, our duplicate website got indexed a month back. Unfortunately there are links to our original website. I noticed that thousands of links are from our duplicate website at "Links to Your Site". Will this hurts? Now we have blocked the duplicate website getting indexed. What to do to remove these links from "Who links the most"? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
38% of SEOs Never Disavow Links: Are you one among them or the other 62%?
Hi all, Links disavowing is such a advanced tasks in SEO with decent amount of risk involved. I thought many wouldn't follow use this method as Google been saying that they try to ignore bad links and there will be no penalty for such bad links and negative SEO is really a rare case. But I wondered to see only 38% SEOs never used this method and other 62% are disavowing links monthly, quarterly or yearly. I just wonder do we need to disavow links now? It's very easy to say to disavow a link which is not good but difficult to conclude them whether they are hurting already or we will get hurt once they been disavowed. Thanks Screenshot_3.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Do more internal links from sub-domains to domain (website) hurt rankings?
Hi, We have nearly 10 sub-domains. Couple of our website top pages including homepage have been linked from every page of these sub-domains; from footer or top menu. Is this kind of linking is bad as per Google? What is the right way of linking between website and sub-domains?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Links hovering at the bottom of a search result
Hey folks, Curious has to the how and why there are links at the bottom of this search query for "Justin Bieber Networth" for other celebrities, completely unrelated i.e. "harry styles, taylor swift" etc. http://imgur.com/DNXuyRW (also attached) Is this an SEO tool? How did they embed this into a search query? Thanks! Screen Shot 2015-06-08 at 12.04.43 PM DNXuyRW
Algorithm Updates | | Anti-Alex0 -
How do you block incoming links to your site?
With the new update to google focusing on link spam and multiple anchor text ? If you have incoming links that you would like to block or make no follow?
Algorithm Updates | | HelpingHandNetwork1 -
Google +1 link on Domain or Page?
Since its release, I've seen Google +1 being used across an entire domain but only reference the root href in the code snippet. At the same time, you see other sites use +1 more naturally with the button being specific to the page you're on. What's your take on this? To clarfiy, do you add: or .. on each page.
Algorithm Updates | | noeltock0