There’s an interesting discussion over at SEOchat Forums: Will I avoid spammy links by copying competitor’s link profile (which seems to work)?
There’s some logic in that:
- If my competitor’s rankings are good, his links must be working;
- If my competitor’s rankings are stable, his links must be good and safe.
Right?
Wrong!
While competitor research is an essential step in researching your niche and getting inspired, boldly copying your competitors’ link is NOT a good idea.
Here are some points against that statement:
- You never know which of those links really worked and which can be spammy: Chances are you’ll copy the easiest ones first (which are most likely to be the weaker ones), so you’ll spam your link profile from the very start;
- Your more established competitor must have a good reputation (trust) with Google, so he can get away with some percentage of spammy links. Newer sites don’t have that prerogative.
- Last but not the least:
if you copy what a competitor is doing… the best thing you can do is tie. To better your competition…. your strategy and its implementation must be better than your competitor
What are your thoughts?
54 Responses
Copying My Competitor’s Links = Avoiding Banned Tactics? (Weekly Q&A) http://t.co/k1IbYiBF at @NinjasMarketing
Copying My Competitor’s Links = Avoiding Banned Tactics? (Weekly Q&A): There’s an interesting discussion over at… http://t.co/AavQWqaq
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Copy your competitors high quality links when you can. Never copy the spammy ones, it may come back to haunt you later. But only have it as a small part of your overall link building strategy.
I think you made a mistake here. Copying the best links of my competitors has never harmed me, the very opposite.
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@jimboykin @ninjasmarketing it’s not about copying – it’s about using them as inspiration 😉
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Copying My Competitor’s Links = Avoiding Banned Tactics? http://t.co/HoIBmGxe
You never know which of those links really worked and which can be spammy
I think a good rule of thumb is to think to yourself “if a google engineer saw this link…what would s/he think?”
Yes, but the bad part is that we are not Google engineers 🙂
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Hi Ann,
Completely agree with you on point 1 of starting with the easy links and chances of harming the link profile, but what startles me is point 2. How do you or Google in the large sense justify that if its a ‘trusted website’, it can get away with spam links.
I mean spam links are spam and with the recent algo changes, shouldn’t Google be discounting all of them applying penalties?
Or is it a case where If I am big enough, I can get away with anything? This is really a bad example and will hurt small businesses the most.
Have you any idea on why Google does this? an official word may be? Will appreciate your comments on this, because I have read some posts on Aaron Wall’s seobook over Google’s bias with big brands and would like to know that the ‘trusted website’ you mention relate to big brands.
Thanks,
ed
Please read the linked thread: it discusses how black-hatters were trying to push SEOmoz down by negative SEO with thousands of spammy links and it never worked – that must be the “trust” factor
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This pretty much sums it up “if you copy what a competitor is doing… the best thing you can do is tie. To better your competition…. your strategy and its implementation must be better than your competitor”
In reality, it will level the playing field, but it’s really the “additional” links you add that will make your site stand apart.
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Copying some backlins with a good research before doing it may help you at start as , let’s say a boost but i think you’re pretty much right about the tie part :))
Spying competitors links is useless most of the time. I’ve personally experienced it and i won’t recommend it. In fact I would rather recommend to find out some giants of your industry and find their backlinks. For instance, If you have a website selling cell phones then you can check out Nokia, Samsung and other Cell phone giants backlinks rather than looking for a local competitor.
Create a list of links and analyze their website, content and some stats, rank them from 1 to 10. Start getting links from the domains above 4. This idea is much better than going for simple link farms your competitor is getting link from.
Most of the time your competitor has poor or easy-to-get links. And Rand recently did a whiteboard Friday that says “Death of Link Building; birth of earning links”. For reference: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-death-of-link-building-and-the-rebirth-of-link-earning-whiteboard-friday
I think this strategy of copying our competitors is more applicable if our competitors’ websites are Google page-ranked to be much higher than ours and we have a need to built more quality backlinks. Of course we should not copy backlinks blindly because, you are right, some links maybe spammy. I would do a Google page-rank check first before I adopt any backlink. If the Google page-rank of a particular website is high, surely it cannot be spammy at the same time. Once we are on par with our major competitors in terms of page-rank, I agree that we will have to develop new strategies to be ahead of our competitors. In the meantime, why reinvent the wheel when it is already there for you to use?
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I 100% agree with you on the last one!
Any real tips on getting some of the better back links ive been beating my head against the wall for days.
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