Linking to Competitors

I noticed a pattern, I am sure is not new to many here: Linking to other sites that rank well fpr your keywords is beneficial for your own ranking.

Now if you are in a competitive business (flyer printing in my case) linking to the competition (and it's all competition thase that ranl well) is a risky business.

Any ideas here how strong this beneficial effect might be, so whether it might be worth the risk?

thx n cheers
Phillip

Acadmically the theory is sound... as each competitor links to both a common and different set of others... thus the more connective you are the more you directly effect all sites around you... while you do indeed help each competitor a little individually that is equally a null which increases everything across the board... the advantage is then in all the different other websites around all competitors and each of those because they link out to a ton of different others influencing an ever increasing circle size 'with you at the center of all things'.

Academically you would be superior to everything around you... in practice though because most of the attributing processes are hidden to you... and too vast to address you could be working in reverse.

e.g. each time a website negate links with nofollow, robots.txt, javascript, jumpscripts, etc., which change things academically the outcome get far more unpredictable.

Well, the competition has virtually no outbound links at all. so I could be almost the only one offering links to flyers-printer, something my feeling goes is very (!) beneficial for my ranking with G.

In order not to help the competition too much, I could do this from some inner pages with less PR and traffic, just the level where G still crawls me, and remains impressed by my cool outbounds.

that's the idea. Now any ideas on how much benefit G might give me for this? Any evidence for that kind of strategy?

thx n cheers
Phillip

It's unfortunate Mate but no amount of evidence would conclude positively or negatively for another set of links and domains...

The only thing I can say in the real marketing world promoting your competitor has real value where profits and market share can be 'pulled' away because you have a better strategic plan.

I don't remember the insurance company's nane that quotes their competitors rates against their own which sends customers away but in fact they gain far more than they lose for being "a trusted source of information" and also have greater control over their competitors' market share...

In "links" - how important is trust?

Better yet... how much trust does Google put in dmoz over get-your-PR8-link-for$299.com?

Also... your "market share" are not your competitors but do have a commercial interest [and websites] and a resource that compares price vs. quantity & offset with shipping would be invaluable to all those companies that 'well' "don't compete with you... how many of those would link to you... add those to offset the potential competitive loss and see which is more valuable.

Competition is a good thing... and when you have a certain amount of control over it... it's a win/win with you having a bigger piece of the pie...

Notwithstanding... it is still your risk.