Competitor’s Names in Keywords

Somehow in the SEO world, the tactics that spammers use seem to really start to catch on with the ignorant public (through publications by internet marketing scammers) a few months after the reasons why you should not use them have been publicized within the SEO field. This makes it very hard for beginners to sort the wheat from the chaff.

A spam tactic that still seems to be gaining ground within the “internet marketing” circles is that of putting competitor’s names in the keyword lists. In fact, this tactic has had some negative publicity lately, but only the experts have paid attention.

There are three main reasons why doing this is a bad idea.

1. Search engines frown on it. It is nothing more than keyword spamming, and it is recognizable by search engines as such. In fact, they pretty much consider any keywords that are in your keyword tags, but not in your content, to be irrelevant, and too many of them are flagged as spamming.
2. Search engines really only pay attention to the first 20 to 25 keywords. The rest are ignored. Frankly, you have more important keywords, more relevant ones, which should be given precedence. When the list is limited, you need to make every keyword count.
3. Legally, you can lose your business over this tactic. No joke. If you use your competitor’s names in the coding of your site (where you cannot put the trademark symbol), and you do not reference them in a way on your site that shows the trademark symbol, they can sue you for trademark infringement. Internet law is still evolving, but the standard is to relate offline law to internet law in a very direct way, and this issue has been no exception - you are using someone else’s tradename for your profit, which is long established as an illegal practice. Given recent lawsuits, there is every probability that you’d lose a suit involving use of competitor’s names in your keywords. They have more money than you, and can hire better lawyers than you can (otherwise you’d not be trying to capitalize on their success).  Many of them have people on staff whose job it is to go looking for tradename infringement - you would not believe how picky they can be! I’d give an example of something we actually experienced, but to do so, I’d be risking tradename infringement for the company in question!

The conclusion is short and simple:

Don’t do it.

It is a tactic which will harm your business, without bringing it one iota of benefit before it crashes on you.