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I am linking one of my competitors from my site for the same keyword which is I am targeting for my site (My competitor is paying me for that).

For Example:

Me and my competitor both are targeting on keyword "foo" and my competitor is paying me for linking his site from my site with keyword "foo".

What I want to know is if I do that will my site's position go down in Google search results?

or it will make no difference?

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3 Answers 3

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You're introducing a degree of extra competition, yes, although it's a drop in a very big ocean.

I'd be far more concerned with the fact that you're selling links. I recommend reading Google's (and other search engines') guidelines on that.

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    depending on the PR of the site's page, the website's niche and the competitors' SEO, this drop could get bigger and bigger. One good link from a good authoritative site can make the difference (assuming there are also other links)
    – milo5b
    Oct 2, 2012 at 19:39
  • My competitor has better PR than my site.
    – Badal
    Oct 3, 2012 at 4:44
  • @milo5b I agree, as you say, depends on several factors, but set against the SEO risks of (a) buying and selling links and (b) openly admitting to it, the keyword competition element would be the least of my concerns.
    – GDVS
    Oct 3, 2012 at 4:48
  • +1 If this is a paid for link then you should have rel="nofollow" on that link in order to not pass PageRank and to not breach Google's T&Cs (which, as mentioned, could potentially cause you bigger problems). If it's a nofollow link then it will not affect your SEO and the site you are linking to will only benefit from actual visitor traffic.
    – MrWhite
    Oct 3, 2012 at 23:13
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No not bad at all. But your competition will be so high as your competitor website use it. You can also make it a long tail keyword or any similar to that keyword and use it.

Thanks

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Your giving your competitor two advantages here:

  1. a targeted keyword from a page about the same semantic field (and even more on a whole website targeting the same semantic field), so you help them rank higher
  2. a direct link for your visitors to your competitor for short-term money

Even when forgetting about the SE guidelines, you tell your visitors to go to your competition, so each prospect you send to them is a prospect you lose knowingly to your competition.

So it's bad for both SEO and brand value.

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  • Bad for SEO and brand but good for money :).
    – Zistoloen
    Dec 6, 2012 at 15:38

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