Exchanging links with a competitor

[pizzaguy]

I realized that instead of going for sites that have little similarity with my content and exchanging links with garbage sites, it is a better idea to ask your competitors for link exchanging. That way I do not have to worry if I am going to link to a bad neighbor since we are in the same boat and they wouldn't either. I wonder any comments about this?

[inbound]

I'd look at companies that operate outside of your territory (unless you can service the whole of the country), you'll get on topic links and not lose customers to a competitor.

There are potential issues with doing this (as with any linking strategy) as search engines may deem you to be part of a network if there's too much cross linking between a small number of sites. Having said that, we've held a number 1 to 3 position on Google for a couple of years for the singular and plural term that describes a popular service by doing this, so if you are careful who you choose to 'partner' with you can do well.

[martinibuster]

In a happy world there are sites that are complementary and not necessarily head to head competitors. For instance, a clothing site can send potentially converting customers to a shoe site, and vice versa. If you are more interested in conversions than gaming the search engines, there are creative ways to go about it.

Sometimes these opportunities present themselves, they have to me.

[RandomDot]

It depends what content/service/product you have - and who your socalled competitors are? For instance if you have a rental service for cars, you might want to make a page about those nice places you could drive too - with a car - and perhaps exchange some links with people in another area than the "car rental service" business? - it doesn't mean that you'll get better rankings in the search engines or so - but it could drive some traffic back to you with time, or at least you get another market in the search engines too .. "hotels, resorts, amusement parks, sightseeing" etc... links are exchanged.. because it's a service you provide, not your main business :)

Just a suggestion anyways - have fun,

[badbadmonkey]

If it's a true competitor you'd rather see drop dead and die like a good capitalist, then the link exchange is going to give the least benefit to whichever of you is best at SEO and so has the "stronger" site.

So, if that's you, it narrows the gap between you and the competitor. Well done. Unless you're trying to gang up on a third competitor, it doesn't make sense to me.

If it's them (be honest) then they probably won't be interested but good luck trying.

lol, Get the link and do yours with JS or a nofollow if they're too dumb to check.