Should I link to competitors?

[Beekhuizen]

Hi, I was wondering: we work in an extremely competitive market. There are 6 companies, offering the same service in my country: price comparison in a niche market. The competitors have hundreds of different websites, using iframe-techniques.

Would it be helpful for me to link to those 6 competitors, in a piece of content about our company strategies, USP's and overview of the market?

From a transparency point of view, i would prefer telling my visitors there are other competitors, which are undoubtedly performing very well, but we perform better on several aspects of the price comparison.

On the other hand, my competitors benefit from the backlinks as well. Is my gain bigger than the gain of my competitors do you think? Has anyone tested this once?

[Gamer07]

Yes, you can link to them. It's not like you would be linking to them on a daily basis. As far as I know Google loves it when you link to relevant sites (outgoing links are valuable too). And what's better than competitors in terms of relevancy. And if they notice that you are linking to them, you could be making good connections with them and who knows, they might do the same. Everyone wins in long term.

[jasmin28]

You can have 1-2 external links to your competitors, however, use only the official name of their websites as anchor text. Do not link site-wide, only from the homepage.

From my experience, this is the best practice.

It is up to you if you want to use dofollow or nofollow in the href.

[Beekhuizen]

Thanks for the answer. You wrote 'From my experience, this is the best practice'. What were your (statistical) findings from linking vs. not linking to competitors? Did it have a positive effect on your website ranking or metrics?

[SanketPatel]

Hi Bart

Here is a nice Whiteboard Friday on "Is External Linking Good For SEO? - Whiteboard Friday".. There is a good discussion on comments regd external links to competitors.

Hope this would helps.

[FWSBIO]

what does do not link site-wide means?? You mean i can only link to  competitors on my home page?