The last and most important reason why copying competitors websites can be a problem is when the copier doesn’t know what to look for.  If a student copies answers on a test they need to know which answers go to which questions or they’ll get a failing grade.  The same is true on SEO copying. The issue with websites and

Another problem with copying the competition’s search engine optimization strategies is that it might set up false pretenses for site visitors.  If you copy strategies that have different goals, chances are you’ll either anger or confuse visitors and not receive the quality traffic desired.  For example, let’s pretend a competitor is looking to hit well for a particular target market in

A problem for everyone that copies the competition’s SEO tactics is that you can’t win a race by matching your opponents speed.  In this case it’s even worse because they already have a head start.  So you have one of two options, take a shortcut to get ahead of them or speed up. Taking a shortcut looks like this in search

More traffic to your site is a good thing.  More traffic to a broken site, is not a good thing.  It’s like better and better advertising that let’s people know you’re not on the ball and unprofessional.  That’s what a broken site is, lazy and unprofessional.  So how can SEO harm functionality?  It’s not uncommon for people trying to copy

Just like with school students, plagiarism reflects badly on a company.  Taking some title tags, keywords, or meta descriptions isn’t going to be noticed by the user, copying a competitor’s site and just changing the name, logo, and photos will.  A common pitfall people make when copying SEO is they don’t know where to draw the line.  This frequently happens when people