Linking to Competitors

will it help my rankings?

[SirFroggZ]

On my website i have placed links to my competitors that have a better page ranking than i do. For one thing i am confident of my pricing. My question is will this help me in my rankings? I am a new comer an love the site. Any help would be appreciated.

[mud]

You will not increase your ranking by linking to sites with a higher PR than yours. The way to improve your ranking is to get links from those sites, and even better, to not link back to them. The reason for this is that if someone is linking to you, and you don't link back, this shows that your site is good enough in the other webmasters opinion to link free of charge (charge being a link back).

[SirFroggZ]

so will it hurt me? I have gotten several compliments from customers who appreciate it.

[Oaf357]

If it helps your business then keep it. Eventually people will flock to your site. When the time is right (you're the authority) yank the links.

[chiyo]

The only way it wll hurt you is if people didn't know about your competitors and buy from them instead!

However if you offer the best product, benefits, service and package in the product class you have the major advantage. It will cause some trust and good PR for your site as it shows you are not scared of competition and are aware of it, so your product MUST be good.

You may also pick upi searches for competitors names. Just link with their names, not their keywords, to avoid giving them too much of a "leg up" in rankings. If the page you are linking to them on is not too high a page rank and you have more than a dozen links (inlcuding links back to your site home/section pages) the advantage to them is neglible as far as page rank goes.

[mud]

No, it wont hurt you.

I was just saying that the best type of link to your site is one you don't link back to. So sorry for confusing you, it wont hurt your ranking and it sounds like it helps your buisness, so keep it up :)

[percentages]

SirFroggZ,

I adopt a similar strategy to you for my own SEO site. I link to the "mother" of all SEO companies so that prospects can compare. The fact this may not do anything for your PR or positions is often outweighed by the business impact it has.

Like you I know the prospects that I am targetting will not pay the prices some of my competitors charge, so sending them to the competition actually encourages them to come back and buy from me!

[SirFroggZ]

Thank you all for the help.

[mervynj]

IMHO, Google would certainly prefer webpages that ALSO link to others - not by much I'd think - but it DOES matter.

[JonB]

You will not increase your ranking by linking to sites with a higher PR than yours.
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some time ago googleguy (when talking about PR 0) said that it is not so importnat who links to you but to whom you link.Here we are talking opposite .

So if you link to pr 0 site (or lower pr or penalized)sites then this link COUNTS FOR YOUR SITE (negatively of course )and if you link to sites with high PR then this links doesnt count at all?

So linking to bad guys can get you some "punishment" and linking to good guys gets you nothing?(just a question,NOT a complaint :)

or is this only importnat when you link to them and they link to you. If there is one way linking only - then it is not importnat if you link to pr 10 or pr 0 site - ther will be no effect on your site. Correct or wrong?

[wackmaster]

We have some minor evidence that linking to other good sites/pages can help your site be seen as an "authority" site, which can't hurt and may help...and I believe that we've read that in various places also.

[Oaf357]

It almost goes back to "you're only as good as the company you keep" in some respects.

If your site links to a lot of crap PR0 sites then obviously you're lowering your PR and those PR0 sites aren't being helped at all.

I'm actually debating a plan regarding linking to sites above a certain PR.

[KevinC]

If you are linking to them why not use a javascript link so that no PR or benifit is transfered to your competitors?

You customers still get to compare but you don't help the other guys out at all.