Question on trading links and making niche edits with a niche "competitor"

TotoMuffinMan

TotoMuffinMan

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I received a message from a site owner who wants to share content from my site on his site and vice versa. We are in the exact same niche writing the same type of articles. His site is one year older but the authority of the page is about average - really nothing to get excited over. He's basically a "competitor" to me but not really since he doesn't have ads up or any affiliate links (that I know of). There's no monetization on his site whatsoever. Essentially, we would be posting links and making niche edits on relevant content that matches both our sites.

My main worry is duplication. There's some duplication that can be done on a site which works well. However, from what I've seen on YouTube and on here, this kind and size of duplication isn't good for SEO. It's just the formula for "bad" sites - the ones that Google won't want to rank and will instead punish. For me it's a high risk-low reward. My links would pass little to no authority on his site and I'd only get the occasional referral visit from his site and his links wouldn't do anything on my blogs besides tell Google they aren't worth ranking. What do you guys think? I've never really thought about this type of arrangement, at least not this early into my site.
 
If you consider it to be high risk, low reward, then you shouldn't be doing it.

Unfortunately, this is one of those things where no one is going to be able to give you a definitive answer, so trust your gut.
 
I have to be honest, I'm not even clear on what it is you're describing in the duplication part.

But at a minimum what I would do is a single link exchange like this:

Your Page A -> His Page B​
His Page C -> Your Page D​

This way you aren't doing:

Your Page A <-> His Page B​

This nets you both one link from each other's sites, gets you another relevant referring domain, and you win because his site is more powerful and doesn't monetize. What's to lose there?

And what's to lose with doing 2 or 3 of these? Nothing. I wouldn't do dozens of these exchanges, but a handful won't hurt and you have the most to gain.

It would fortify both of your rankings against incoming competitors. If at the end of the day, the two of you rise to the top and nobody else can manage to compete with either of you, you now only have one competitor to deal with instead of two, and he's an ally who's not going to play dirty, it seems.

You WILL compete with someone at the top. It might as well be a guy willing to flow his page rank to you while not monetizing well (or at all).

But what are you talking about with this "duplication" discussion? How will his links tell Google that your posts aren't worth ranking?
 
Ryuzaki said:
But what are you talking about with this "duplication" discussion? How will his links tell Google that your posts aren't worth ranking?
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I forgot to add that he would be including paragraphs, small bits of my articles, if you will, into his site. That's what I meant about duplication.

As for the rest of your reply, that's what I was thinking. I'm probably just going to say yes to the links and not the paragraphs. I just have to be super careful in not doing My Page A <-> His Page B link exchanges.
 
TotoMuffinMan said:
I forgot to add that he would be including paragraphs, small bits of my articles, if you will, into his site. That's what I meant about duplication.

As for the rest of your reply, that's what I was thinking. I'm probably just going to say yes to the links and not the paragraphs. I just have to be super careful in not doing My Page A <-> His Page B link exchanges.
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all of that duplication is gonna harm you in the long run
 
I thought Niche Edits was a euphemism for hacking into sites and putting links to your site on them.
 
all of that duplication is gonna harm you in the long run
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I don't think so: Google is usually clever enough to see where the content comes from. Certainly not expecting any "harm" to his website but the benefits might be neglible if you're both linking too each other.

Like @JamaicanMoose said there is no clear answer here but personally I'd lean towards allowing it.
 
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