One of our competitors recently bought a really old, generic keyword domain in one of our categories. I'm hoping some of you may have some advice for me in fending off this "new" old domain's inexplicable meteoric rise. Let's illustrate the players with example names: widgetsforsale.com - our competitor's original domain, #1 in SERP widgets.com - old domain competitors have bought, has went to #2 from >1000 in the last 3 months buywidgets.com - our domain, started at #3/4 but is now #6 * widgets.com was registered in the late 90s, has changed hands several times, and currently has a PR of 0. * widgets.com has the exact same content of widgetsforsale.com, down to the products, filenames, disclaimers, descriptions, and everything else. The only difference is the domain name itself. * Widgets.com has no backlinks or directory campaign, with about 30 backlinks coming from sister sites owned by the same business with the rest being adwords links from various .info sites. * Widgets.com has a strong internal link structure (with HTML-ized product file names) that it inherited from widgetsforsale.com (with an identical structure). From what I can tell widgets.com has went from nothing to #2 based solely on the strength that it is an older domain; they have no backlinks, their content is not unique, and the site has only existed in its current state for 3 months. Because of this both the #1 and #2 spots are locked up by the same company with sites that don't really differ from each other. This also means the CPC positions for this keyword are usually split even further. My question is, what's to be done? I'm doing some things in the background (link building, article adding, internal structure tightening) on buywidgets.com but I was wondering if anyone had any specific advice to combat the dreaded encroachment of the "sudden authority site". I realize that the best approach would be to build our own authority, but other than the methods I've outlined above I'm not sure how. PS-This isn't complaining about google's domain age criteria or saying "o woe is me these cheaters bought an old domain". Instead I'm hoping for any anecdotal advice about what some of you have done in the past, or would consider doing in the future if this happened to you. Thanks for reading!