Interesting case, unsure if positive or negative SEO

[seoholic]

A competitor has the same service that we have.

A news agency like reuters distributed an article, containing some quotes of our competitor, the name of the spokesperson and domain name (not a link), starting with a capital letter.

Also there were two links attached, one irrelevant for this case and one to my service page, with exact anchor text in the article and/or with URL as anchor text below the article, depends on the implementation.

This article did spread to 50 or more newspapers within 24 hours, which will give our domain popularity a nice boost.

Normally that would make me happy. But in this crazy times? Who would you rather be: the guy with the exact links or the guy with quotation and brand name/domain name in the text?

[Clay_More]

O.K., you got a link relevant to your site content that you did not ask for, pay for, beg for.
The content with your link included is now spreading.
I say WTF are you asking?
That is the way the un-manipulated web is supposed to work. Revel in your greatness and build upon it.
Good job.

[seoholic]

Thanks.

There is a huge difference between how the web and Google work and how they are supposed to work. I see a spike in link growth with the same one-keyword anchor text and some websites will even be on the same server, since small newspapers aren't that independent anymore. Meanwhile my competitor gets a safe branding bonus.

I'm curious if my competitor will flip some links next week, that would at least tell me, that this didn't happen on purpose.

I spent all night writing emails to the newspapers where whole paragraphs were missing because the CMS couldn't handle the link and they don't proofread the text (doesn't work as supposed again). At least I should take all of the links, can't get out of this anyway.

[ColourOfSpring]

O.K., you got a link relevant to your site content that you did not ask for, pay for, beg for.
The content with your link included is now spreading.
I say WTF are you asking?
That is the way the un-manipulated web is supposed to work. Revel in your greatness and build upon it.
Good job.

Google can't measure offline negotiations in that way. Without manual intervention, it sees only a link from site A to site B - end of story. A lot of UK newspaper sites were penalised by Google a few years ago for link selling, so it's not automatically "good" that you win links in this way - it can end up being a poisoned chalice if Google's algo decides it's not quite natural. In fact, a lot of so-called newspaper sites are little more than Reuters scrapers mixed with advertising. Getting a link from Reuters is a bit like getting listed in DMOZ - that link itself is good, but it's going to get facsimilied onto a bunch of scraper sites.

[Awarn]

Why is the article about or quoting their spokesperson yet the link is to you (their competitor)? Either I read that wrong or that is strange. I bet they are small newspapers too.

[seoholic]

The quality of the referring domains is quite diverse. We got links from top 10 newspapers/magazines, a TV-station, portals like Yahoo and everything down to local newspapers sharing the same template and hosting and rather obscure sites.

Why we got the link? No idea. It is indeed a strange scenario.

But I think that this is a nice scenario to see the effects of links vs. branding. After all the number of competitors is quite limited and they are ranking right below us. If we switch positions during the next weeks, this will indicate that those links were risky and/or that this kind of branding works.
So far everything looks good, especially the rankings that I interpret as an indicator/early warning system.