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We are a small company competing for traffic in an industry with more or less one other very large brand. I'm noticing we are getting a descent amount of organic traffic for the competitor's brand name however I haven't done any on-page inclusion or link building for the term. We are using their brand as a keyword in our paid campaigns and seeing potential. I firmly believe we have a superior product. I'm tempted to start going after our competitor's brand as a keyword to skim some of their traffic. My question is how far it too far? Do I actively try to obtain a few anchor text specific backlinks? Dare I use their brand name as a term on our page? Maybe just a simple blog post comparing our two products is more appropriate? Any suggestions are appreciated.

I've been a subscriber a little over a year now and my ranking graphs keep growing in size and they are getting hard to use. Is there a date range filter? Another year and it's going to be a big mess. ranking_mess.png

I was just starting to feel like I was getting traction and all of a sudden half of our external backlinks just disappeared! Over the past 4 months we've taken our total external links from about 2500 to 6500 and with the lastest report, we seem to have lost more than half and are now around 2100. Our domain authority has dropped accordingly too.  I realize that backlinks aren't forever but what in the heck could cause you to loose over 4000 in a one month period? eK9w

I've placed in my head tag on duplicate content pages, but do i need to place it on  the target page such as http://www.example.com/index.html too?