Will a link from a competitor help me to out rank them?

[Nola504]

Greetings mozers,

One of my competitors and I both rank on the first page for our main keyword. They have 37k+ links, me only like 300 or so. My company actually has a business location though. This other site is just a listing of locations and they build sites for most of my competitors.

If I were able to get listed on their site, would that make me a stronger competitior with them?

And we would probably only get a brand term link from them but not a main keyword anchor text.

Will it be as effective to get the link from them if it's only for my brand name?

Thanks, Cy

[MoosaHemani]

To be honest it’s never about number of links pointing to your website it’s always about the quality of links pointing back to your site.

You have to analyze their link profile to see if the links pointing to them are quality or they are just some low quality links to increase the total number of links to the site (this is common). If they are quality then your should put your effort in following the footstep of your competitors… but if you think they are not worth investing links then I would prefer to continue investing your time and money on quality and natural link building…as it is long term!

To get competitor’s link list Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO will work best!

[AgentsofValue]

It sounds like your competitor is quite strong, to have that many links, and it may be regarded as a hub in your industry, if it already is working together with a lot of your competitors. The previous answer was right - you need to take a look at the links of the competitor, and see if it has a strong link profile (vs tons of automated link spam).

If you consider the site to be respected in your industry, I would probably invest the effort to get listed on their site.

In the long run, as a local competitor, you should be able to beat out a national competitor, through a combination of:

• building a stronger, more interesting landing page and content

• building more links to that landing page (both branded and keyword links as appropriate)

[Nola504]

Thanks for the response,

I have checked out their backlink profile and it is strong. They do act as a hub for similar businesses in my area, they also have a strong .edu and .org profile. They build sites for other businesses in my area and have those sites link back to this 'hub' site. So all the links are relevant.

They have also been featured on sites like the huffingtonpost.com which isn't really related to my industry but the huff-post's link profile is massive.

I'm current'y working on content and building links. So it seems only logical to try to join forces with them. I've spoken to this agency and they seem eager to help, but we haven't spoken about at what cost yet.

I think it will be a good investment, hoping to get a little more encouragement from the boards tho.

Cy