Well, actually it doesn't I feel sorry for them. I have a fairly authoritative site in a certain field. A while ago I reported about a project with the full link to that project. Today, the project hit the news big time and their site is down. Oh well, I guess they didn't plan for it, so they should fire their webmaster (but thats just what I think). Anyways, it turns out, during the last view days, their URL got searched a lot and today I already siphoned over 1k uniques to my site, because I rank for their site (I only have one link and I never mention their site again on that page. Its like linking to google and then ranking for google) Let there be no confusion: I didn't plan for this. I didn't put a link anywhere to this article from any external website. I didn't do anything to harm them (if anything I helped their ranking by linking right at the top of my article and giving them all credits), but today I have seen my traffic go up a bit, just because they are down. I wrote about this when not much press was out. My page ranked fairly well (but still below them and thats where it should be). Lessons learned: - Get in early (this is actually the hardest part) - Be a good guy (I guess not many people will come back, but some might) - Plan for spikes so their misery won't happen to you. I think they could have anticipated the spike but didn't. - Have an authoritative site. Instead of many small sites (if related) have one big site. You can easily leverage off the authority of that site, without even having a single link to that article. The old way of thinking of each page as a seprate site is outdated. This last point is outlined here in an excellent fashion: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-rising-tide-lifts-all-ships And although I usually don't give too much about what SEO say, this one is IMPORTANT.