Comments on: Startups, linking to your competition will help you – no, really

By: Billing System

Billing System — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:31:00 +0000

I don’t see any search engine related benefit to linking only one way to a related business in your industry. I also don’t see any harm in doing so. This is quite pointless to be honest.

By: Werner Wichmann

Werner Wichmann — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 12:13:00 +0000

Our company has been doing what you have been talking about for a while and we are getting excellent results. It is really useless to keep focussing on pagerank, rather focus on the quality of links and the users experience and google will reward you. simple really.

By: Danny

Danny — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:27:21 +0000

Your missing the point! what about the link back? you cant just spread links on your site like that, you’ll lose your link juice. Definitely if you don’t have a partner website with the same niche you will lose or by means get a link back from anywhere.god knows what algorithm Google coming up with. Google give good traffic in sites with quality link backs within the same niche, but getting links from other non related sites still works, not as good but works

By: franz enzenhofer

franz enzenhofer — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:22:45 +0000

yeah, and windows 98 was an awesome operating system. anyway: expert understanding of the interna of win98 will not make a great developer in 2010.

knowing the pagerank formula (and most who talk about it dont even know or understand it) does not do you any good on your seo job now.

oh yeah, both win98 and pagerank were developed 1998.

pagerank is thoughtcancer. so please get over it.

By: franz enzenhofer

franz enzenhofer — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:14:50 +0000

the web is not a zero sum game. you help yourself, you help others, you help your market segment, you help google, you help your user. – or you just not do it. then, eberybody looses (or to be correct: everybody not wins) if in doubt i choose to be on the winners side.

i recommend googling “zero sum bias” for more understanding why people insist on non scaleable competitive thinking.

By: Marti

Marti — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:40:16 +0000

@Danny… Tom is talking about linking OUT to competitors as per the recommendations in this post. He is saying he wouldn’t recommend linking OUT to competitors and I agree. You’re just assisting their SEO benefits by doing this.

By: Startups, linking to your competition will help you – no, really | Blogle.org

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:25:17 +0000

[...] on eu.techcrunch.com « Hello world! Category: Technology | RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a [...]

By: Danny

Danny — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:42:13 +0000

Who cares, you can get high paid one way links to your sites, like linking from paid relevant sites, directories, but is that good enough? How does the food chain work? the same as the google algorithm, it follows a rule of a chains effect. Do you know that your not losing much linking to the competitor, its actually good, your helping google find you better, now getting the link is the matter, and i doubt you’ll get the anchor for it but a link is a link. Now yes when the competitor is strong in the engines, your more than likely to be deleted by the competitor, as your not helping him, he’s helping you now.

By: Danny

Danny — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:30:40 +0000

“Sounds more like the argument of someone with User Experience in mind rather than SEO imho. Linking out can have a positive impact (even on rankings) but ranking to competing websites / pages? I wouldnt recommend it to clients.”

Obtaining a link from a competitor is still good as the google algorithm will still find content relevancy better than a link , although when the competitor smartens up, he would go on a comment cleaning frenzy!

By: Tom Nash

Tom Nash — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:17:05 +0000

Sounds more like the argument of someone with User Experience in mind rather than SEO imho. Linking out can have a positive impact (even on rankings) but ranking to competing websites / pages? I wouldnt recommend it to clients.

By: Marti

Marti — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:34:24 +0000

Sure linking out to other relevant sites doesn’t hurt you (in fact it’s thought it can help a little) but linking to direct competition??? Ok, it won’t hurt your site but at the same time it will help your competitors. When you’re trying to out rank the competition do you really want to be helping them but giving them good relevant links and not get anything in return… ?

By: Barbara

Barbara — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 08:25:53 +0000

you don’t have to swap links to have links on other sites. You can add a link to your site on http://yoomoot.com/ for free… without begging… as long as it’s relevant to a discussion. So the deal is: write a quality post on yoomoot and you can post a relevant link to your site… – if it’s not relevant or it’s not a quality post then it gets deleted.

By: Iqbal Gandham

Iqbal Gandham — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:44:36 +0000

Interesting article, and one I feel makes sense (although cases studies would do more to convince)

I would look at linking to competitors in a ‘special box’ in your website, and asking people to go and take a look. If they do a) you know where they are going, and b) just ask them that if they choose someone else’s product/service if they would be kind enough to let you know why ?

So you do them a favour by saving them time, and letting them know of similar services, they in turn return it by giving you feedback to make your product better.

Iqbal

By: Danny

Danny — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:21:55 +0000

This is what im talking about! It has to be the competitors or the relevancy of both sites. Linking with the competitor is great link juice, and why would he be worried of his PR, if the meta data is there for ever on that page, NP. What bout the anchor text Franz ???

By: amrix

amrix — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:19:59 +0000

your pagerank argument doesn’t make sense at all, especially when compared to the pagerank equations

By: Stefan

Stefan — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:37:52 +0000

Thanks very much Franz (and everyone else that asked great questions). You saved us lots of time in doing the wrong things. S

By: franz e.

franz e. — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:27:19 +0000

i 100% agree – and i have encountered all the arguments you mentioned and thousands more in various colors (angry red to shocked yellow) and sizes (from “oh no” to “oh my f*cking G.. you want to do what?”).

linking out from your valuable pages to other valuable pages is a challenge in itself – but it is also a major competitive advantage, an advantage that startups can tap into much easier than big companies with oversized legal departments.

By: Andrew Girdwood

Andrew Girdwood — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:11:28 +0000

I think you have to ask questions like – just how and where would a site like Target.com link out from? Their product pages? A blog?

Linking out from their product pages would be an administrative challenge, they’d have to make sure none of those links wound up pointing to 404 errors, or none of the pages they pointed had been bought and transformed by spammers. Target, I feel, would want to stress that they’re not related to the companies they’re linking too nor would they want their customers to think there was a connection.

The same is true for most finance sites; perhaps even worse as there may be local legislation which restricts who/where they can link to.

Linking out is pretty easy if you’re a content publisher; a blog or newspaper. I don’t think the same is true for companies in most other sectors.

By: franz e.

franz e. — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:20:59 +0000

please re-read the article above, it practically is the antithesis to link swapping.

now i’m a little bit frustrated.

By: Ziad Salloum

Ziad Salloum — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:13:09 +0000

I meant link exchange or swapping. Coz I have the same problem. I want to exchange links but I am unable to find partners.
My site is about chatting with mini profile, http://www.SimpleConnexion.com, i case someone is interested