A site is using their competitors names in their Meta Keywords and Descriptions

[PeterConnor]

I can't imagine this is a White Hat SEO technique, but they don't seem to be punished for it by Google - yet.

How does Google treat the use of your competitors names in your meta keywords/descriptions? Is it a good idea?

[PeterConnor]

Great feedback folks.

Using Competitors names Is furthest from my mind. I prefer to focus on getting good Organic Search Traffic by ethical means. I was surprised when I came across this issue, because of who's doing it (a major player) and because it's a recent enough tactic of theirs, so I decided to ask for a second opinion.

Thanks for these great answers

Chris

[Ron_McCabe]

Chris,

We ran into this with another firm in the Seattle area.  They were using all the names their competitors in their meta descriptions and they did go so far as to include specific pages dedicated to each competitor.  In the end several of the companies went after them for copyright infringement as they violated their copyrights to create these pages. This is a more aggressive path but it is one you could consider.

Ron

[stever999]

They will never rank highly for those keywords unless they dedicate the whole page to thier competitor so it's pretty pointless!! Using AdWords they might get a few visits but they will pay a premium for the clicks as the quality score will be low.

Also, and as mentioned above, it's deceiving the user which is never white hat SEO so I would advise against it.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

It's an interesting question, because it leads to a whole lot hypocrisy on Google's part. If you can buy your competitor's name in adwords, then you should be able to use in your meta-description without any penalty. I'm not sure what ethical leg they would have to stand on in that case, but to answer your question:

Whether or not you should add the competition's brands depends a lot on what you're selling, but it strikes me as an overall bad strategy. For example, if you are competing with Zappos, it might be okay. Why? Because, people don't buy Zappos, they buy shoe's that Zappos sells. So, if someone ends up on your site, because they thought they were going to Zappos, but instead sees the shoes they want, it might be okay. People do this all the time with software.

Now, if your competition is the iPhone and you redirect someone to a Samsung site, I'd say you're in trouble. Not only will the user be far more displeased than in the previous example, BUT they are much more likely to pogo-stick, as well. It's one thing to have a pogo-sticking problem because you don't have good information, but if you actually had decent content and just slipped in the competitors name in the meta description, you may create a pogo-sticking problem for a site that doesn't deserve it. In essence, you could hurt your ability to rank for what you built the page for, in the hopes of picking up a few more customers on the fringe.

Best,

Ruben

[EEE3]

It's definitely not a good idea. People don't like being deceived, and I imagine all of these pages have miserable bounce rates. As a user, imagine clicking on a search result thinking you're getting one company and you end up on the landing page of another. Definitely a poor user experience.

In Google's Quality Guidelines, one of the things they specifically mention is:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

• "Don't deceive your users."

As for this site using the competitors names in their meta keywords (outdated) and their descriptions, I don't know if Google has a specific penalty to address that specific issue (maybe others will comment on that), but I do know that Google is looking for accurate information in page titles and other areas of the page to return relative results to searchers.

Overall, it's a bad practice unless done so for legitimate reasons (you are The NY Times writing about new owners of The Washington Post).

Additionally, there's an exception here for AdWords where you can buy a competitor's name and show up for searches in the paid search results. But I'm assuming you're referencing organic search results.

Hope that helps. I know it can be frustrating to see.