can I be penalized by the big G for this?

[co-creator]

I'm thinking of getting backlinks from everywhere one of my biggest competitors is getting backlinks and more.

If I copy my competitors' backlinking strategy, can I get penalized by google?

For example, if I have backlinks from all the places my competitor has backlinks, does that affect my rankings negatively?

Also, is it enough to beat him?

[frankfihn]

Originally Posted by co-creator

I'm thinking of getting backlinks from everywhere one of my biggest competitors is getting backlinks and more.

If I copy my competitors' backlinking strategy, can I get penalized by google?

For example, if I have backlinks from all the places my competitor has backlinks, does that affect my rankings negatively?

Also, is it enough to beat him?

My freelance SEO guy begins with reverse engineering my main competitor's backlinks. I mean, when is also getting your top ranking competitor's backlinks a bad thing? You will find that you won't be able to get all of them though but take what you can get can and beat them at their own game. This is especially recommended for bigger, more challenging keywords.

You're also going to want to go out and try and get your own topically relevant authority backlinks beyond just your competitors.

[webapex]

Duplicating link sources in itself is probably OK, it's a strategy recommended by some gurus, but if your competitor have an authority site that accumulated it's backlink over several years, you can get in trouble duplicating them more quickly.

If your backlinks matched than on site seo qualities would deside the winner.

[brandon2664]

I always go to yahoo site explorer or backlinkwatch and copy my competitors backlinks. If they are doing something that is working It will probably work for me. I don't think google penalizes for this and i'm sure you can beat the competition.

[iAmNameLess]

Google DOES NOT penalize for that. You can pretty much eliminate any myth of google penalizing people by something you do. If you spam out blog comments to your competitors website, will it penalize them? No. If you spam out back links that have already been used by another competitor, and use it against them, will it penalize your competitor? No. Therefore, you're in the clear!

[Ian Varnava]

First of all, attempting to gain backlinks by utilizing everything your competitors are utilizing, is not a news flash or anything. It's been done for years.

Second, people need to start understanding and looking at this stuff with some common sense. Why would you get penalized by "The Big G" for it? Do you have control over where your website gets linked from on "The Big Internet"?

Sure, you can buy a 100,000 "links special" and possibly gain millions (albeit usually crappy quality) links, but so can your competitor, or anybody, for YOUR website. So why would Google even take that kind of stuff into consideration? People need to drop the "guilty conscience" mentality and take it for what it is.

What happens when any given brand new website LEGITIMATELY becomes popular all of the sudden? Everyone and their mother links to them. Does that mean "Big G" penalizes them? Not at all... reward if anything, or possibly Neutral if their algorithm may possibly, conceivably, deem that this looks like a shady/low quality scheme so we'll keep this page on the backburner for now.

But penalize YOUR website based on which websites are linking to it, or the fact that your competitors have links from the same pages, never.

[yukon]

OP has more than a single competitor, OP has thousands of competitors.

Get as many high PR backlinks that your competition has, then get some more. The higher the better.