Site Replaced By A Competitor

[bobby_boy]

I wondered if anyone else has experienced anything similar to this.

I while back I ranked #3 for a search term (not that competitive a term but nice to have anyway). Since then I did some link swapping with a competitor of mine which I thought would benefit us both. About a month ago my site was replaced by the equivalent page on this competitors site. This effect has also been repeated across a number of other smaller search terms (the larger ones seem uneffected).

I've guessed that due to the linking, Google has assumed our sites are within the same 'network' and has deemed to only show one of them in the results.

What I've done since is completely delink the sites from the competitor hoping that this will reverse it.
My question is, do you think this situation is permanent or just temporary? I'm hoping it will go back to normal again after the next back link update but am not convinced.

Any advice/views greatfully received.

[uncle_bob]

Have you checked to see if your competitor is still linking to you? Some folk make reciprocal links only to drop their end after a short while.

[bobby_boy]

He has also removed all links to my site.

I'm just not sure whether I am permanently attached to his network in googles eyes regadless of what I do now.

[wanna_learn]

bobby_boy

Remove his Links from your site immediately and speed up getting some good links to your site.

Your Compititor is far much smarter!

[wanna_learn]

bobby_boy

Remove his Links from your site immediately and speed up getting some good links to your site.

Your Compititor is far much smarter!

[Kwix]

bobby_boy
I agree, remove your links and watch who you link to. Make sure that the "Links" pages are not overly populated and view the source to make sure that they do not have a meta robots "Noindex, nofollow" tag present. Also check the robots.txt page to make sure they have not disallowed spidering of the links page or directory. Last but not least, check up on them at least once a month, maybe more often, to make sure that your links are still there and still doing you some good.

[bobby_boy]

Do you think his pages replacing mine in the searches is permanent or just temporay until I manage to get other links coming in?

[Kwix]

In search engines, everything is temporary.
Just curious but by "equivalent" did you mean the page text is the same, or nearly so? If so then it could be a hard fight to keep rankings somewhat steady. If possible, make your text as different, yet targeted as your competitor. This way, you may trade slots from time to time, but not be knocking each other completely out due to the "duplicate content" filter.

[bobby_boy]

The content is (and has always been) unique on both sites with the only similarities being the general subject area i.e. they are both about blue widgets.

Hopefully this will work in my favour after the next update.