Ever taken a shortcut somewhere before?
I remember taking shortcuts that turned out to be long cuts, costing me far more in time than I would have had to spend on the straight path.
I know you may have had similar experiences yourself, but despite all what we know about taking shortcuts, and the risks associated with it, the human tendency to seek unfair advantages will get us into that lonely bush path one more time, hoping for some different outcome.
When it comes to link building, we make the same mistakes. We take shortcuts and end up spending more time fixing up the damage than heading where we were supposed to in the first place.
This post highlights one link building shortcuts that can lead to much agony down the road. It is no other then the sleazy bad boy of link building – competitor analysis.
Why Copying Your Competitor’s Backlinks May not Replicate Their Results
I have copied my competitors’ backlinks in the past and in all honesty I will still do so in the future, but I do so taking into consideration a lot of other metrics, on site and off site.
Now I have that off my chest, time for some home truths: I want to observe that I have found the emphasis given to competitor analysis in the SEO space to be very lopsided.
In my experience, the backlinks profile of your competitor is a piece of the jigsaw that explains their website’s success or failure and not the complete picture.
In most cases, it may even be a small piece of the jigsaw.
Spying on and replicating the backlinks of your competitor offers no guarantee that you will be able to match their ranking in the search engines if you are not able to mirror other aspects of their unique web presence.
Have you given attention to the content cache they have? If your competitor has over 5000 well written and backlinked articles, chances are you will have a hard job trying to dislodge them with your blog of 100 posts.
Have you considered their social media strategy? How many persons are tweeting and sharing their posts online?
What is their repeat visitor percentage? If it is quite high, have you considered what they are doing so right to make their site sticky?
Are they offering a freebie to get emails for their newsletter? Can you match the quality of the freebie they have of offer to get you as much optins as they are getting? Even if you get the emails, you have to consider the newsletter content.
Can you sustain a newsletter with high quality content for a long stretch of time to keep your audience not only opening but clicking on your links?
If you just look at just backlinks, you may be blind to this big picture which influences how Google and other search engines treat those backlinks your competitors have.
Now, do not get me wrong, as I said before, competitor analysis is a strategy I use and will continue to use – just don’t get lost in following someone else’s shadow.
What happens when your competitor changes strategy? What do you do? Do you panic and change too or do you just stick to what was working for them?
That reminds me of an experience I had in Kindergarten, which brings me to the question:
Are You Copying Backlinks blindly?
In a letter writing task, a girl who shared my desk copied from me word for word. Where I made mistakes and had to cross them off, she would cross off the exact portions of her own letter!
She even signed my name at the end of her letter. It was that bad.
Now this may sound ridiculous but I hope it demonstrates what happens when you copy backlinks blindly.
Just because a site links to your competitor and your competitor’s ranking is better than yours does not make the site a good backlink source.
When you copy from your competitor, you copy everything including their mistakes – backlinks they got in bad neighborhoods.
Most persons who do competitor analysis do not step back to analyze the quality of the individual link sources. Some of the links may be bad, and in copying blindly, you may just be creating more work for yourself down the road.
Just in case you are not aware of this, Google has warned repeatedly that bad links can hurt our rankings. In the past, Google just ignored bad links, but their algorithm update has changed that.
Bing has a feature where a web master can disavow a link, but not so with Google. Now their logic clearly states: ‘If bad guys love you enough to link to you, then you must have something in common’. Childish thinking, I know, but who am I to argue with Google?
Before you copy your competitor’s backlink, do an appraisal of the linking site and answer the question: ‘Is this site a useful resource?’
If it is, then by all means go ahead and get your link. But if the site is full of rehashed trash or spunned articles, you may not want Google to associate you with them.
To Cut the Long Story Short (Pun Intended)
If flying blindly by night has worked for you when it comes to link building, then do not let this post bother you.
However, if your efforts are seeing little or no results are you sure you should not spend more time onsite making a useful site than chasing after backlinks?
When you have a site that can compete in quality with your competitor’s website, both you and Google will know and each incoming link will apply its full weight on your ranking.
Have you taken dangerous backlinking shortcuts? Which of your fingers got burnt?
Let’s hear it in the comments.
About Yeremi Akpan
I do analyze my competition from time to time and when I see something I like, I adapt – not copy, definitely not copy. I care about my style and authenticity. However, I always thought competition is good, it makes you want to do more, exceed your limits. Don’t you agree?
Hi Alex,
Being aware of what your competition is up to is very important in business – not so that you can copy them -though that is always an option – but that you may be prepared for them and not be shocked by a surprise maneuver.
Competition brings out the best in us -when we are prepared for it.
~Yeremi
Yeremi recently posted..10 Ways to Optimize your Blog for Subscriber Opt-ins
Hi Yeremi, nice to see you here
Proper competitor’s analysis can’t kill your blog – it can only help you
But as you wrote – you must analyse whole blog, not only links…
Thanks for sharing,
Chris
Chris recently posted..10 Crucial Tips How to Prepare Viral Post
Hey Chris,
Great seeing you here too!
As I said in the post, I am interested in the strategy of my competitors and I have analyzed their profile for many of my online businesses. I however draw a line at mass copying.
Not that I do not copy – I do, but as you say I insist on doing it strategically by getting the full picture – not just backlinks.
~ Yeremi
Yeremi recently posted..10 Ways to Optimize your Blog for Subscriber Opt-ins
When I started blogging,
I did not know anything about SEO, as for istance the difference between Nofollow and Dofollow links,
or how much a link from a site with bad reputation can hurt your rankings.
Time ago when I created this blog, I just started building links in a fool way,
in few words as inexpert.
I have removed most of them (the bad ones), and saw the results during the time.
So yes, most of the time shortcuts are just bad ways to build backlinks.
I have just started the guest posting, and I think this is the most effective way to make SEO nowadays.
Thanks for the great content, Yeremi.
Great pleasure to have you here!
Thanks for the comment, Erik!
I appreciate the insight you have brought to bear on the subject! As I said in the post, taking shortcuts often turn out to be long cuts, as your case unfortunately confirms.
It’s good to know you removed the bad links. One cannot be too careful about who he associates with nowadays…
Yeremi Akpan recently posted..10 Ways to Optimize your Blog for Subscriber Opt-ins
Like anything, copying a strategy blindly is not going to work as well. I agree that using a competitor’s backlinks is simply a springboard for doing your own analysis and figuring out whether they will work for you. I’ve only done a little bit of copying — I usually find my own backlinks, the old-fashioned way, through Google. And so far it’s been quite effective.
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Hi Leo,
Great to have you here! Glad to know you are having good results without having to be a copy cat. I also find backlinks opportunities through Google and while my backlinks may not number in thousands, I have discovered every one of them counts.
Yeremi Akpan recently posted..10 Ways to Optimize your Blog for Subscriber Opt-ins
Thank god i landed on this page , i was about to copy my competitor’s backlinks
i feel that quality matters in backlinks , i’ll test and see anyway.
Hi Enoch,
I am glad you found this post useful. Competitor analysis is useful when it comes to keeping your “enemies” closer. Knowing what the competition is up to is invaluable – as you will be prepared for the outcome of whatever strategy they implement.
Don’t just use it to mirror backlinks…
Yeremi Akpan recently posted..10 Ways to Optimize your Blog for Subscriber Opt-ins
Hi Yermi, Thanks for your post. Getting quality results is not always expedient. Being aware of what competition is doing is not a bad thing. I’m not sure how to copy backlinks, however, so if the opportunity arises, I’ll remember this discussion!
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Hi Luanne,
Thanks so much for the feedback. I am glad you found our interactions on this post informative!
Yeremi Akpan recently posted..10 Ways to Optimize your Blog for Subscriber Opt-ins
Hi Yeremi,
Yes – I do agree. A good number of backlinks are the one thing a lot of webmasters are to desperate for achieving. But the quality of the link is the most important. It does not help to have a thousand backlinks all pointing to your website from spammy or low quality websites. This does not contribute any value – and can be harmful to your rankings in the Search Engines; which a lot of people only realized after years of using spammy backlinking methods and had to start over with their whole projects and websites (as some decided to do) as it was just easier than removing all the low quality backlinks.
Thanks for the feedback, Anton!
That is surely a scary scenario, one everyone with a valued web property should avoid at all cost. The cost of cleaning up a bad link profile may be so prohibitive that it becomes impossible to implement.
It pays to think long-term in any link-building campaign.
Nice post Yeremy,
I would like to say that I don’t want to copy my competitor’s backlink strategy because recently I’ve found out that one of my competitor started buying links just to beat me
and in return he got PR3 in recent update.
BUT I know he will be kicked from Google because of this.
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Google gets the best minds behind their algorithm development. If you try to fool them, it may just b for a short while. A long term strategy is best if one is working a long term project, and that involves doing things Google’s way.
Yeremi Akpan recently posted..Getting Started Blogging – How to Make an Impact With a new Blog
I have analized my competitors, especially after Google’s updates. I just wanted to find out why they have high ranking and what esle I can do. And this help. But stealing backlinks will soon be useless, I think.
Hi Helen,
I am glad this helped.
Yeremi Akpan recently posted..Getting Started Blogging – How to Make an Impact With a new Blog
Hi Yeremi bro….
Very nice and logical thinking behind this article……I am also in favor that instead of copying your competitor you should make yourself so big that other start following you…..
Very valid point highlighted by you regarding backlink and social profile of competitor.
sandeep kumar recently posted..Tips to get traffic from commenting on others blog | Power of Comments
Thanks for the vote Sandeep!
The whole point of the post was to place a premium on originality.
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