There is a great thread at Cre8asite Forums on the topic of what to do when your SEO competition is gaining on you within the search results.
It happens all the time, you watch a specific set of search results and you slowly see a specific site climbing up to your ranks. What can you do to make sure that site does not pass you?
Moderator, EGOL, replied saying that you make your site better. He said:
- For an information site I would improve the content on the pages that are being defeated. Produce content that is best-on-the-web for your topic and that can attract links that will lift you in the rankings. Promote those pages to all relevant traffic on your site with the hope of collecting some links, "likes", tweets, etc.
- For a retail site... I would create useful and informative content that is best-on-the-web related to my product pages that are being defeated and link to those product pages from that content. The hope is that your great content will attract links, "likes", tweets, etc. Also, your page of useful and information might pull in some traffic and that traffic might follow the link to your sales page.
He also recommended that you create more than one page on your site targeting that keyword phrase and see how it does. EGOL explained:
For especially valuable turf, and where my site is strong enough, I don't hesitate to create two or three pages that compete for the same keyword. If you can get one of your pages to #1 and a second page to #10 then the second page will be listed beneath your first page and you can have #1 and #2 for that keyword. I have seen Google award up to four positions to a website for a single keyword. That can really push your competitors down below the fold.
Administrator, Iamlost also came in and offered a defensive strategy against low quality sites gaining in the ranks. He offered five tips:
(1) First: many/most scrapers take the easy route - they scrape your RSS feed. He offered defenses with protecting your RSS feeds.
(2) Second: many/most scrapers do not always cleanse scraped links. So add links to your feeds.
(3) Third: as an increasing number of scrapers are 'reformulating, i.e. spinning, scraped content it can be impossible to prove copyright infringement. So be more specific in your content.
(4) Fourth: build bot defences in depth including reverse DNS and blocking. Bouncing bots before they can scrape is a good thing.
(5) Fifth: attack: Use DMCA request, report spam to Google and so on.
This thread is worth a read.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.
