Hi,

I have read a lot to follow your competitor's websites and try to get baclinks where your competitor's site have. Or follow the keywords used by competitors website. But I think it is not good idea to blindly follow your competitors website for links or keywords or anything else as your competitor's website may be of very old it may have a lot of negatives for which may harm our new site because of updation in search engine strategies and alogrithm.

As an example while working on link building for one of my site i come to know that my competitors website has a lot of backlinks from bad neighbourhoods and I also found stuffing of keywords a little bit but still his site performing well it may be because it was around 10 years old and at that time search engine strategies and alogrithms were not so advanced.

In this way i think it is not good to blindly follow the cometitors website for backlinks and only try to get links from relevant sites is better..

what do you think...?

If your competitors jumped off cliffs, would you follow them? Of course not.

Obviously examine where they get links from and how, but don't just do what they do. Make sure your site is providing something unique compared to your competitors - something that will make you stick out above them. Analyzing their activities can certainly give you an insight in possibly what to do, but don't do any stupid link exchanges, or use blackhat/underhand methods to promote your site.

You're assuming that the reason the competitors have the ranking they do is because of the age, despite the keyword stuffing and bad links.

Like whym said, do YOUR thing for YOUR customers and for YOUR business. There's a keyword there you should really be focusing on.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

You're assuming that the reason the competitors have the ranking they do is because of the age, despite the keyword stuffing and bad links.

Still that's a lot better than assuming the competitor ranks because of the keywords stuffing and link trading. Our padawan friend is on the right track.

I'd say that keeping an eye on what your competitor does isn't a bad idea, but following the same things that they do isn't always a good idea.

I'd say try to look for links that could send you traffic that could convert into a sale/lead or customer relationship before doing anything like hidden text or keyword stuffing.

It might take a little more time, but you won't have to worry about getting your website booted from the search engines or advertising programs.