Should You Link Out to Your Competitors? #ASKNEIL Video Lecture | Be a Blogger: Beginner to Expert - Professional Skills

I hate to say it, you're not going to produce
the best content on the web.
Sure, you may have some amazing articles,
but your competitors probably have some amazing
articles as well.
Hey, I'm Neil Patel and today, I'm going to
answer the question of, "Should you link out
to your competitors?"
Well, the short answer is, "Yes."
It doesn't matter if someone's even a direct
competitor.
I've had that in many cases.
For example, with my last startup, kissmetrics,
one of our competitors was mixpanel.
You know what?
In a lot of our blog posts, I linked out to
them.
When it's relevant, and it makes sense, and
it benefits the reader or the user, I link
out to them.
Why?
Because I'm doing what's best for them.
If you do what's best for your visitors, it'll
help you grow, not just because it's building
loyalty ... That's one benefit, but the other
benefit that most people don't realize is
when you link out to other websites, especially
competitors, Google understands what neighborhood
your website belongs in, what it's about,
what your topically relevant towards.
When they have this information, they can
rank you better.
It's all about giving Google signals.
With me, I don't just link up to my competitors,
I also link out to other websites within my
space even if they're not direct competitors
and they're informational websites.
A lot of times, I'll site them because they
have amazing information and they've done
all this research.
I don't care if their products are somewhat
similar to mine, if it's amazing, I'm going
to site them.
By linking out to them, it shows Google, "Hey,
this Neilpatel.com site isn't just about Neil
Patel.
It's about marketing in general.
Look, he's linking out to everyone else within
this space so if they rank well, we should
also rank him well because he's linking out
them and because he's linking out to them,
a lot of them actually even link back out
back to him.
We should also rank him highly just like how
we rank the competitors highly."
That's why you should link out to other websites,
especially competitors.