Hi, We have an established commercial website with excellent page1 Google ranking for important keywords. Our website is to sell our one single product. A competitor has recently appeared on the scene selling a 'copycat' product, and ripping of most of our ideas. They have one main website (fictitious example): www.widgetfarming.com, but have set up 4 further websites each with domain names made up of our most popular key phrases, for example: www.becomingawidgetbreeder.com, www.startingawidgetfarm.com, etc. Their plan is obviously to swamp the search results for our keywords and phrases. The 4 further websites are only single pages, simply Home pages (index.html) each with a clever variation of the textual content, but all links to all internal pages on all their Home pages go to their main website www.widgetfarming.com. Therefore all internal pages of all their sites are identical! Duplicate content issue?? We have checked Google's results and their new sites are rising steadily in the search results for relevant search phrases. Google therefore seems to be fooled by the different text on the home pages, and oblivious to the identical content on all internal pages. We know that they have employed the services of a professional SEO company. I would appreciate any comments and advice on the above tactic. Thanks guys, bialystock -
I think they did a very nice on page tactics with a rich of quality content plus good links reason why they are doing good... its not about the other sites they have I think its for the purpose of getting quality links but if Google see that they are in the same IP they may flag as spam and get penalize.
Google also gives domain names that are identical to the keyword being searched for some major prominence and basically does a "brand stacking" deal with em, even though they aren't even branded. With the eCommerce site I work with, it is actually very annoying because of all these little spammy sites popping up on the first page just because their domain is the keyword.
If they have taken your content, then you can submit a DMCA takedown request, although I doubt that will do much. If you are in a low competition market (ie it is just you and these other guys duking it out), then really the only thing for you to do is what they are doing, but better. I would start by grabbing a wordpress.com and blogger address and start posting content. Don't link back to your site, or any other site, (their mistake) just make it so that every page has your contact telephone on. Then I would look at creating a page for some fictitious "institute of widgets" and build that up too.
Thanks for the feedback guys. They must be confident that Google will not penalise them because - 1) all links to 'internal' pages point to their main site URL 2) they have all the domains in one single G/Analytics account. (easy to see from the GA scripts. e.g. ######## -1, ####### -2, etc.) We are considering doing exactly the same as them. There are many variations of our key phrases. But we don't want to wreck our excellent page 1 ranking for our current website. Is this a good idea? Thanks again, bialystock