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I was position 5 for a fairly competitive word, and then one day I got sent to page 8. Obviously my revenue dropped like cow droppings.
I didn't think much of it (the inexperienced guy I am) and just attributed to Google reshuffling the serps. But now, another site of mine has shown some dropped revenues as well, and that got me doing some research. I went back to my first site and did a search for some keywords like my site's name, and lo and behold, I am NOT the first result on the serps. Instead, I get some directory listings that seemingly copied (some/part) of my description, and they get ranked higher than me.
I know all too well that there's ways SEOs do this, through 302 redirects, meta refreshes, etc. My question is, what can I do? Do I take it to the offending sites (and in all honestly, are they legally offending anything?) by tracking the owners and sending a cease and desist and remove any reference to my site from their database, or do I just try and fight it out by ..what? more agressively doing link exchanges, etc,etc?
I'm a small player and I thought I could merrily do my own thing, but I guess I just graduated to fish bait.
