| Linking with Competitor Websites - Should You Do It?
As a webmaster, when you develop a reciprocal link program, you need to define the kinds of sites with which you want to trade links. These sites are normally in your website's category of interest, or sites that you feel your visitors might find interesting.
As you choose your potential linking partners, unless you have a one-of-a-kind product or service, there may be many sites like yours that you know trade reciprocal links. Should you ask them to trade links? Should you entertain competitors' link trading requests? Should you show your competitors links to your website visitors? This question is all up to you, but here are my thoughts.
The Internet is not like the Old West, where, to paraphrase, "This Internet's not big enough for the both of us." If you are a webmaster, software developer, marketer, or in just about any other business, it is foolish for you to believe that you are the 'only game in town.' In fact, it is even more foolish for you to think that your visitors will believe you are the only site of its kind (unless, for some reason, you actually are, and then you are one of the lucky ones).
If you provide links to competitor websites, you may hurt your business. You may take your hard-earned traffic and point it to someone else's company. You may be providing your competitor with many new leads.
Of course, that competitor may be providing you with many leads as well.In many industries, each company specializes in a certain facet. You may have better customer service, a lower price, you may deal with only a certain group of customers, etc. In this case, providing links to competitor websites really may not be hurting you at all. You would just be showing your website visitors where they need to go for their needed products or services. Most people will remember this act of goodwill.
Take this idea to the example of the webmaster business. One webmaster can not produce every website out there on the Internet (they would have absolutely NO social life whatsoever)! That is why most successful webmasters, while they try to gain new clients, usually deal with their same set of clients whom they have been providing good service. If they are really successful, they may not have enough time for many new clients, and they may be very choosy with whom they wish to develop websites. For such a webmaster's own site, a link to other webmaster that can satisfy their visitors' needs may not be such a bad idea. This may even result in gaining new qualified leads from the websites with which you reciprocally link.
On the other hand, if you are desperate for any business you can get, or if you are not confident in how your product or service stands up against your competitors, reciprocal linking to such websites may be a very bad idea.
Consider this question carefully, because if you run a popular site with a reciprocal link program, this scenario is bound to occur. A competitor will ask you for a reciprocal link. Decide if it is in your best interests to either accept the link or politely decline the offer. Either way you choose, always act and respond professionally. |
| | Benefits of Reciprocal Linking One of the best ways to help promote your site through the top search engines (like Google) is to have links pointing at your site from as many other different domains as possible. Most, if not all, top rated search engines employ a formula that includes link popularity as one of their main criteria for ranking sites. Beware of offers that promise "Tons of Traffic". Do not get sucked in to the pop-ad scheme. Pop-ads will ruin your site. They will steal your Internet lifeblood.
"Link Long and Prosper!"
By Jeff Noli SEO Specialist |
| | Reciprocal Linking Works! Reciprocal Link Partners take a lot of time to locate and set up. Too much time, in my opinion. My time is too valuable to waste surfing the web blindly. It's cheaper, easier and faster to just pay someone to do it for me while I spend my time making money. By Blanche M.Martin | | | |
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