It takes a lot of time and effort to get backlinks that are actually worth it. Most outreach methods, like guest posting, do not work for new websites. So what are the alternatives? SEO Experts recommend stealing your competitor’s backlinks.
But, is it worth it? Well, not really, not for new websites. In this blog post we will explore why it’s a brutal waste of time.
We will discuss how your top competitors acquire backlinks and if it is worth it, or even possible to steal them. Okay, let’s jump right in.
How does your top ranking competitor build thousands of backlinks but you struggle to get even ten?
That’s because your competitors:
- Have a bigger SEO budget than you.
- Make better content.
- Use blackhat strategies.
- Purchase tons of expired domains.
- Acquired backlinks from forums and directories.
- You end up spending time in a futile activity.
- You may trigger email spam detectors.
You competitors have a bigger SEO budget.
SEO Budget is a big factor in determining how fast a website ranks. A big budget allows you to purchase backlinks, hire influencers, buy better tools, and more.
Effectively, a budget allows your competitor to have scores of people taking care of SEO while you have only 1 or 2.
As a result, they produce content faster and promote it extensively.
Okay, how feasible is it to steal their backlinks? Not much. See, they paid for their guest-posts and all outreach methods, it’s their property. The host website will not replace your competitor’s URL with yours because they probably wrote that piece! Plus, your competitor will know if they lost a backlink, they will put a claim on it.
Your competition owns better content than you.
They have probably been in business for years by now! It’s imperative that they created a lot of content to reach the place they did.
When a website creates useful content consistently, they attract heaps of natural backlinks. These backlinks are free and preferred by Google.
It took a lot of effort for your competition to reach where they are. You may steal a link or two, but without creating content like they do, you will never outrank them.
And even if you go the skyscraper way, you can’t offer enough impetus to the host blogger to replace a high domain outlink with yours. The content quality has given your competition a huge brand weight in the business, they are bending space-time in your industry, they’re that big!
The above two reasons are why you can’t steal most backlinks from your competitor, even if you try to. But at times, your competitor might have crappy backlinks. You don’t want to steal them. It’s like stealing stuff in the movie Drag me to hell. Poor backlinks will come back to haunt you. And as a new website owner, it’s difficult to identify suitable domains for backlinks.
Let’s see a few more reasons why a campaign to steal competitor backlinks are not worth stealing.
Your competitor uses blackhat backlinking strategies
Just like keyword stuffing, black hat backlinks can drive up the domain authority temporarily. Of course, Google catches up and either ignores the backlinks or penalizes the website.
But, what if your competitor has poor quality backlinks but continues to rank high?
That could be because they acquired those backlinks ages ago. Anyway, you should never go for those backlinks.
For instance, blog commenting used to be a famous method of generating backlinks before the Penguin Algorithm Update hit websites with a proverbial Thor’s hammer. If you do that following your competitor, you will get smashed to a pulp with them when Google knows about it.
Even paying for backlinks is a blackhat method, Google deems only natural backlinks worthy of attention. But right now, since Google can’t peek into your inbox, it can’t know which backlink is paid. But once Google finds a workaround, a lot of websites may lose their ranking.
Do you want to go and get those backlinks? Please don’t.
You competitors purchase tons of expired domains.
A lot of high domain authority websites get abandoned by their owners. Soon, they are no longer hosted and cease to exist.
But, some SEO agencies buy these domains and resuscitate them. The purpose is to provide a backlink for your competition from these domains. This sure puffs up the domain authority score on SEO tools but doesn’t add any real value. It drives no traffic because it’s a zombie domain. Lifeless.
It is possible that your competitor hired one such agency. They don’t realize that they are paying for vanity backlinks.
Imagine you approach the zombie websites to replace your competitor’s backlink. It’s simply not going to work.
Your competition has acquired backlinks from forums and directories.
Look, getting backlinks from forums and directories is not illegal, but often, irrelevant.
Time for a story. When we started our website, we found one of our competitors flouting every SEO whitehat rule. They had stuffed their website with so many keywords, it was impossible to make any comprehension. They had about 3500 backlinks as per Moz and thousands more as per Ahrefs.
But sure enough, they were ranking at the top for local results. All until one day, google kicked them into oblivion. Funny how they stayed in snippets for a bit before vanishing off the SERPs.
However, them not being on Google SERPs doesn’t mean they are off the internet. Their profile is still available. When we looked in, we were flabbergasted to see their backlink profile. They were an SEO agency with backlinks from unrelated directories, some even X-Rated.
They probably got carried away with link building as they did not see any negative impact on their ranking right until that one fateful day. We’re sure you don’t want to steal their backlinks.
Or do you?
Alright, we covered why it is either infeasible or not worthy to steal backlinks from the backlink quality perspective. Next, we will talk about why it’s absolutely not worth your time.
You end up spending time in a futile activity.
Imagine the time you will spend on trying to steal backlinks! Everytime falling flat on your face because of the above methods.
And since it did not work, you go back to expert advice and change your outreach template, but again you fail, or maybe you get a backlink from a low quality website after sending 100 outreach mails.
Is it worth it?
What if, instead, you spend those hours writing for your own blog! You can write 20 blogs in the same amount of time that you spend on outreach. And over a few months, these articles will not just bring you natural backlinks, but also tons of traffic that you can monetize.
The sunk cost of email outreach is too high. It deprives your website of what it needs the most – Quality Content.
You may trigger email spam detectors.
Did you ever notice that emails from certain IDs always end up in your spam folder? You know why? Because many people who received mail from that domain felt harassed or misguided.
You may end up being blocked from inboxes by spam bots. How? When you send the same text to hundreds of inboxes every day, you are bound to raise red flags.
Plus, if you follow-up on your outreach, one too many times, some bloggers may mark you as spam. Or even, some bloggers may be so fed-up with outreach mails begging for a backlink that they may block you without opening your mail.
This will keep you from reaching your audience ever. It is a long process to remove your mail ID from the blacklist. So, don’t get there.
Conclusion
In this post, we covered 7 reasons why stealing backlinks from competitors is a criminal waste of time. You are far better off creating content and letting backlinks flow in.
Building a natural backlink profile It’s not easy, but 100% worth it!
Okay, so are you willing to quit on the stealing campaign?
