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
-
Why is this site ranked #1 in Google with such a low DA (is DA not important anymore?)
Hi Guys, Would you mind helping me with the below please? I would like to get your view on it and why Google ranks a really new domain name #1 with super low domain authority? Or is Domain Authority useless now in Google? It seems like from the last update that John Mueller said that they do not use Domain Authority so is Moz Domain Authority tool not to take seriously or am I missing something? There is a new rehab in Thailand called https://thebeachrehab.com/ (Domain authority 13)It's ranked #1 in Google.co.th for these phrases: drug rehab thailand but also for addiction rehab thailand. So when checking the backlink profile it got merely 21 backlinks from really low DA sites (and some of those are really spammy or not related). Now there are lots of sites in this industry here which have a lot higher domain authority and have been around for years. The beach rehab is maybe only like 6 months old. Here are three domains which have been around for many years and have much higher DA and also more relevant content. These are just 3 samples of many others... <cite class="iUh30">https://www.thecabinchiangmai.com (Domain Authority 52)</cite>https://www.hope-rehab-center-thailand.com/ (Domain Authority 40)https://www.dararehab.com (Domain Authority 32) These three sites got lots of high DA backlinks (DA 90++) from strong media links like time.com, theguardian.com, telegraph.co.uk etc. (especially thecabinchiangmai.com) but the other 2 got lots of solid backlinks from really high DA sites. So when looking at the content, thebeachrehab.com has less content as well. Can anyone have a look and let me know your thoughts why Google picks a brand new site, with DA 13 and little content in the top compared to competition? I do not see the logic in this? Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | igniterman75
John0 -
Client Wants To Use A .io Domain Name - How Bad For Organic?
Hi, I have a U.S. client who is stuck on a name that he wants to get as a .io (British Indian Ocean) domain name for a new site. Aside from the user confusion/weirdness, how much harder do you think this makes this sites organic in the U.S. in the future with a .io domain name? FYI, the other part of the domain name he wants to use is short, meaningless and implies nothing in and of itself. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945012 -
Should I delete older posts on my site that are lower quality?
Hey guys! Thanks in advance for thinking through this with me. You're appreciated! I have 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content that has been a large focus of mine over the last couple years. They're incredibly important to my business. That said, less experienced me did what I thought was best by hiring a freelance writer to create extra content to interlink them and add relevancy to the overall site. Looking back through everything, I am starting to realize that this extra content, which now makes up 1/3 my site, is at about 65%-70% quality AND only gets a total of about 250 visitors per month combined -- for all 384 articles. Rather than spending the next 9 months and investing in a higher quality content creator to revamp them, I am seeing the next best option to remove them. From a pros perspective, do you guys think removing these 384 lower quality articles is my best option and focusing my efforts on a better UX, faster site, and continual upgrading of the 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content? I'm honestly at a point where I am ready to cut my losses, admit my mistakes, and swear to publish nothing but gold moving forward. I'd love to hear how you would approach this situation! Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ryj0 -
I have a recipe food blog and use wordpress, but my recipes are usually in more than one category...?
The recipes are in most cases in more than one category (usually two) each. Do and (and if so how) need to set each post to one canicol url? E.g A recipe on Peas is in healthy foods (which is the default wordpress cat.) and also Vegetarian Dishes. I use YOAST for wordpress
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kelly33300 -
Do I lose link juice if I have a https site and someone links to me using http instead?
We have recently launched a https site which is getting some organic links some of which are using https and some are using http. Am I losing link juice on the ones linked using http even though I am redirecting or does Google view them the same way? As most people still use http naturally will it look strange to google if I contact anyone who has given us a link and ask them to change to https?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lisa-Devins0 -
Whats up with google scrapping keywords metrics
I've done a bit of reading on google now "scrapping" the keywords metrics from the analytics. I am trying to understand why the hell they would do that? To force people to run multiple adwords campaign to setup different keywords scenario? It just doesn't make sense to me...If i am a blogger or i run an ecommerce site...and i get a lot of visit regarding a particular post through a keyword they clicked on organically. Why would Google wanna hide this from people? It's great Data for us to carry on writing relevant content that appeals to people and therefore serves the need of those same people? There is the idea of doing White Hat SEO and focus on getting strong links and great content etc... How do we know we have great content if we are not seeing what is appealing to people in terms of keywords and how they found us organically... Is google trying to squash SEO as a profession? What do you guys think?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theseolab0 -
Benefit of using 410 gone over 404 ??
It seems like it takes Google Webmaster Tools to forever realize that some pages, well, are just gone. Truth is, the 30k plus pages in 404 errors, were due to a big site URL architecture change. I wonder, is there any benefit of using 410 GONE as a temporary measure to speed things up for this case? Or, when would you use a 410 gone? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0