Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
A site is using their competitors names in their Meta Keywords and Descriptions
-
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?
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Page title optimisation - Does suffix keywords matters?
Hi Moz community, We can see in many of the page titles; "brand & keyword" go after every topic like..... "best tiles for kitchen | vertigo tiles". Do Google count this suffix as any other word in page title or give low preference just because it has been repeated across every single page? What if the "keyword" is repeated with topic and brand name as well. I mean which one of the below 2 page titles gonna workout better in correlation with keyword and website authority ? best tiles for kitchen | vertigo tiles best tiles for kitchen | vertigo Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Dfferent domains on same ip address ranking for the same keywords, is it possible?
Hello, I want to ask if two domains which r hosted on the same server and have the same ip ( usually happens with shared hosts ) tries to rank for the same keywords in google, does the same ip affects them or not.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RizwanAkbar0 -
Preventing CNAME Site Duplications
Hello fellow mozzers! Let me see if I can explain this properly. First, our server admin is out of contact at the moment,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley
so we are having to take this project on somewhat blind. (forgive the ignorance of terms). We have a client that needs a cname record setup, as they need a sales.DOMAIN.com to go to a different
provider of data. They have a "store" platform that is hosted elsewhere and they require a cname to be
sent to a custom subdomain they set up on their end. My question is, how do we prevent the cname from being indexed along with the main domain? If we
process a redirect for the subdomain, then the site will not be able to go out and grab the other providers
info and display it. Currently, if you type in the sales.DOMAIN.com it shows the main site's homepage.
That cannot be allow to take place as we all know, having more than one domain with
exact same content = very bad for seo. I'd rather not rely on Google to figure it out. Should we just have the cname host (where its pointing at) add a robots rule and have it set to not index
the cname? The store does not need to be indexed, as the items are changed almost daily. Lastly, is an A record required for this type of situation in any way? Forgive my ignorance of subdomains, cname records and related terms. Our server admin being
unavailable is not helping this project move along any. Any advice on the best way to handle
this would be very helpful!0 -
Suspicious external links to site have 302 redirects
Hi, I have been asked to look at a site where I suspect some questionable SEO work, particularly link building. The site does seem to be performing very poorly in Google since January 2014, although there are no messages in WMT. Using WMT, OPenSiteExplorer, Majestic & NetPeak, I have analysed inbound links and found a group of links which although are listed in WMT, etc appear to 302 redirect to a directory in China (therefore the actual linking domain is not visible). It looks like a crude type of link farm, but I cant understand why they would use 302s not 301s. The domains are not visible due to redirects. Should I request a disavow or ignore? The linking domains are listed below: http://www.basalts.cn/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | crescentdigital
http://www.chinamarbles.com.cn/
http://www.china-slate.com.cn/
http://www.granitecountertop.com.cn/
http://www.granite-exporter.com/
http://www.sandstones.biz/
http://www.stone-2.com/
http://www.stonebuild.cn/
http://www.stonecompany.com.cn/
http://www.stonecontact.cn/
http://www.stonecrate.com/
http://www.stonedesk.com/
http://www.stonedvd.com/
http://www.stonepark.cn/
http://www.stonetool.com.cn/
http://www.stonewebsite.com/ Thanks Steve0 -
Should I delete Meta Keywords from a website?
Hi Guys, I've been reading various posts on the Q&A section here at Moz about Meta keywords. I understand that meta keywords are not relevant with Google and that Bing signals this as spam. I'm optimising existing websites which already have meta keywords in the html coding. My question is: If I delete ALL meta keyword coding will this have any negative impact whatsoever? Thanks Mozers Jason 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Grant-Westfield0 -
Site dropped suddenly. Is it due to htaccess?
I had a new site that was ranking on the first page for 5 keywords. My site was hacked recently and I went through a lot of trouble to restore it. Last night, I discovered that my site was nowhere to be found but when i searched site: mysite.com, it was still ranking which means it was not penalized. I discovered the issue to be a .htaccess and it have been resolved. My question is now that the .htaccess issue is resolved , will my site be restored back to the first page? Is there additional things that i should do? I have notified google by submitting my site
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | semoney0 -
Closing down site and redirecting its traffic to another
OK - so we currently own two websites that are in the same industry. Site A is our main site which hosts real estate listings and rentals in Canada and the US. Site B hosts rentals in Canada only. We are shutting down site B to concentrate solely on Site A, and will be looking to redirect all traffic from Site B to Site A, ie. user lands on Toronto Rentals page on Site B, we're looking to forward them off to Toronto Rentals page on Site A, and so on. Site A has all the same locations and property types as Site B. On to the question: We are trying to figure out the best method of doing this that will appease both users and the Google machine. Here's what we've come up with (2 options): When user hits Site B via Google/bookmark/whatever, do we: 1. Automatically/instantly (301) redirect them to the applicable page on Site A? 2. Present them with a splash page of sorts ("This page has been moved to Site A. Please click the following link <insert anchor="" text="" rich="" url="" here="">to visit the new page.").</insert> We're worried that option #1 might confuse some users and are not sure how crawlers might react to thousands of instant redirects like that. Option #2 would be most beneficial to the end-user (we're thinking) as they're being notified, on page, of what's going on. Crawlers would still be able to follow the URL that is presented within the splash write-up. Thoughts? We've never done this before. It's basically like one site acquiring another site; however, in this case, we already owned both sites. We just don't have time to take care of Site B any longer due to the massive growth of Site A. Thanks for any/all help. Marc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | THB0 -
How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?
A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry. They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors. It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kevin11