Hi, Am I allowed to link back to my site using a rival's site title as my anchor text? For example: <a href="mysite.com">Title of Rival Site</a> So the backlink obviously links to my site but with the anchor text of my rival's site. Why would I want to do this? So it bumps my site up in the page rankings when people search for my competitors site. So in essecne when people search for "Title of Rival Site" in Google I would be present in the top 10 due to the backlinks style described above. So that's the explaining, my question is, is it allowed, or will Google peanlise me, and if it is allowed does it sound like a good idea?
I think it would depend on what their company name/title is. If it is a trademarked term, they probably would have grounds to ask you to take the links down. Perhaps you can include their name in your link anchor text but add another word after. For example, they can't do anything about a link that says 'abc company competitor'. Then it wouldn't require as many links with their exact company name as anchor text. You could also mix up their keywords. If there company name is 'a & b company' you could use things like 'company that sells a & b'. I'm not sure if these strategies would be considered black hat. It is probably a dark shade of grey.
Good idea, my competitors have site names that could easily be mixed up as you describe. I think i'll give it a go!
This actually works really well. It plays into the fact that the search engines don't like to fill up lots of serach results with sites from the same domain. Therefore, if I type in "Coca Cola" I only get coke's site once. Because there are nine more spots to fill, you can often get ranked very quickly this way. Add some persuasive copywriting in your title and meta description (it's best to say you're better than your competitor) and you've hit a pretty sweet conversion technique that has been implemented by deft SEO's for years.