Forum Moderators: buckworks
I'm at a bit of a crossroads here, and I wanted some feedback.
Our (2 year old) niche industry site is doing relatively well, and sales are relatively steady (if not somewhat down from last year at this time).
However, I see a rather ugly problem starting to rear it's head.
Specifically, several of our competitors have been building dozens of "mirror" sites which draw form the same product databse, but are only slightly different.
The fact that these people are building dozens of these sites is (IMO) bad enough, but...
Using these (what are, IMHO) "throw away" domains, these competitors are using every dirty trick in the book short of cloaking to garnder free traffic (i.e. thousands of virtually identical keyword-doorways, etc.)
Now...it would be all too easy for us to do the very same thing. Adding a "generic sitebuilder" setup to our system (accoriding to our programmers0 would take all of about 2 days, after which we could build as many "throw away" sites as we want, etc.
However, I really don't want to do that. We've spent so many hours building our brand that I feel investing in these shoddy marketing techniques is just a shoddy and unethical way to market online.
What do you think? Should I just say "screw it" and join the crowd...or stick to my guns and hope google FINALLY responds to a spam complaint (FYI - 11 out of 11 of these mirror-domains were removed from Yahoo last month).
and make sure u do a better job at it than they do.
many a large corporation does exactly the same under aliases/fronts/offshores etc etc.
good luck
Shak
