drall - 1:05 am on Jan 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

bwnbwn, after tracking down content thieves for years I became pretty good at investigating people trying to hide true ownership details. Every one of these sites are owned by one company.

LifeinAsia, you hit the nail on the head. What they have done is the later of your choices, they have purchased the existing companies and let them run as before and with minimal changes to design except to take the strongest features of one site and include it in a slightly warped way on all of the other sites.

Martinibuster they also crosslink the sites carefully and load them with anchor text and the like. They are just a monster now and the main site they own is in the alexa 200 range. From a seo standpoint this is a nightmare to compete against.

To me it seems like I am just about the last man standing that hasnt given in.

I have spent thousands of hours trying to figure out how we can make us substantially different but the problem is they own so many unique variations of the same basic theme that they have just about every angle covered.

We simply cannot take them head on, just a matter of diminishing returns and scalability. I think we need to produce something not easilly reproducable that trumps anything they have in any of these sites. Just easier said then done ;)