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Last week, we ran a poll asking if you should risk linking to competitors. The specific question we asked was, "Do You Link To Direct Competitors?"
Not sure if you are surprised by the results, but after receiving 140 or so responses, 56% said they never link to competitors while 27% said they rarely do and 14% said they do link to competitors.
Here is the full break down of results:
Question: Do You Link To Direct Competitors?
:: Never said 79 respondents or 56%
:: Rarely said 38 respondents or 27%
:: Yes said 19 respondents or 14%
:: Other answer... said 4 respondents or 3%
The other answers were basically rarely responses.
Are you surprised by these results?
Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Josh Millrod
10/22/2009 04:41 pm
Call me sneaky, but linking to your competitors and building links to your competitors can be a great strategy. Once you top out a tough competitor, point some links at them so they retake the position. After a month or so of them feeling falsely secure, trash those links or redirect them to your site. You'll have done a month's worth of linkbuilding and caused your competitor to let his/her guard down.
Rahman Mehraby
10/25/2009 12:24 pm
I have a question for SEO companies who get comments on their blog posts written by another SEO company: Will you publish such a comment although you know if provides a link to the competitor? I've done this as eventually my readers decide if they like to leave their SEO works to me or to them. Besides, good comments enrich my blog.
Greg
10/25/2009 09:57 pm
Since you are employing the nofollow tag on this blog and although a commenter can put their url into their comment, then is it correct to assume you would have been in the 14% bracket of yes?