The importance of assholes in SEO

Sometimes, when you have a website that is doing well in a small niche, is inevitable that an asshole will appear and will clone it. Depending on various factors, this could be a good thing or a disaster for you.

Today, I am gonna tell you why is a good thing.

I have a small site that’s one of the best in its niche. A few weeks ago, I received a link exchange email and I checked the website requesting it. To my surprise, it was a total clone of my own website, starting from the categories, content and monetization. Unfortunatelly for the sad bastard, here are my aces:

  • My site is 2 years old
  • Lots of natural links
  • Lots of authority links
  • 8000 RSS feed subscribers
  • Excellent internal links on Google

Why the appearance of the clone is a good thing? Well, in order to take my position in the niche, he is forced to throw in the heavy artillery. He is forced to try a lot of optimization methods and he is forced to gain a LOT of incoming links. Due to the fact that he is a cheap competitor, he is not buying links but he is gaining them through request and submissions. Because my site was doing great through link baits and natural link growth, I’ve never payed attention (read this as: I was too lazy) to gain more external links. Now, the competitor is doing all the hard work (research) for me and all I have to do is to use Yahoo Site Explorer to track his actions and follow his steps :D

To summarize: if a competitor appears don’t go nuts. If it is a spammer he’ll get kicked by search engines algorithmically. If it is a good competitor and you have some advantages on him, analyze his steps and stay one step ahead always.

2007
12/08
CATEGORY
SEO
2 comments

  1. If your site is of the type that relies more on links and SEO instead of valuable user service, you’ve got a problem.

  2. That’s white hat crap. Really. And no offense. You could have the best service for your users but without links and optimization you’ll end up badly. I’ve never said that I rely mostly on those 2, and when I said that is the best on his niche I meant that has the best quality in his niche.

    The problem in my case was that the other one already duplicated my service (pretty well I’d might add) and right now is a battle on who gets the best links :)

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