Linking to the competition
Posted: Jun. 23, 2008
As I’ve been poking around the internets for sites that compete with chinabites in the “I’m looking for a place to eat in Beijing” market, I’ve been amazed, every day, at the sheer volume of sites up that are trying to do the same thing. In Business 2.0 parlance, we call them the competition.
Somewhere in the region of 80% of the traffic to chinabites.com comes from Google searches. My own informal searching for specific restaurants in Beijing leads me to believe that my pages are getting fair to good placement on Google’s search results page (page 1 or 2). I also notice that in many cases, the chinabites page that the user lands on from these searches is very bare bones, sometimes containing nothing more than the restaurant’s bilingual contact info. This stands in stark contrast to the lush imagery and community input on the detail pages for the very same restaurants produced by my aforementioned competition.
I believe that it would help a user who hits an info-poor chinabites page to have a list of links to other great (or better?) pages about the thing that they’re looking for. So as weird as the idea of promoting the competition on my site is, because I think it could give some value to the reader, I’m going to give it a try. I used about an hour of late-night work time and made a generic django app that is capable of adding a link object to any other data object on the site and pushed it into production. Look ma, no unit tests! Here is the first example of a restaurant detail page on chinabites with links to the detail pages produced by the competition. Notice in particular the link to images page for the restaurant at dianping.com, one of my personal favorite Chinese web 2.0 sites. I think that link in particular fits the goal of helping an English speaking user find information about the restaurant that might be useful to them, and ironically, it’s a link to a site that’s exclusively in Chinese.
So what do you guys think? Is linking to the competition smart? Are there details about the implementation that I should be concerned about?
