Competitors Copy my Links

Any idea how to protect them?

[burcot]

Hi,
My industry doesn't have many non commercial sites, therefore i spend hours thinking and searching for unique ways of obtaining authoratative links.
Today i obtained 2 nice links from old respected sites that have thousands of .gov .ac etc links pointing at them.
Problem is within a couple of weeks (when the respective pages are cached) you can guarantee my competitors will copy me.

Question is - can anyone advise how to avoid this?

I already buy available sites in my niche, which guarantees they won't get a link. The only way i can think of is pointing all new links to a site under my control that in turn links to the main domain.

Question 2. How much does this method dilute the power of the link?
I should add that by power, i don't mean PR, but trust.

The other webmasters imagination seems to runs out after buying links on foreign newspaper sites. i don't think they should be rewarded for my hard work, and improvisation.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Cheers, Mark

[goubarev]

There is nothing (white-hat) you can do to "hide" where your links are coming from. Re-directing the "trust" through intermediate website defits the purpose.

[MrStitch]

Sometimes when I negotiate deals, I try to take steps to reduce or eliminate the competitions chance of getting their links next to mine. Cash or product helps (don't know what your niche is).

Don't have those means? Then I'd keep doing what you're doing but just try to find a sneakier way to do it.

Ever thought of trying to get those other site's links removed from your newly found sources?

Talk to the owners, brown nose a little, and keep doing as much as you can.

Also, you're first idea isn't too bad, but might be costly. To make it worth anything, you'd need to get a separate IP at a different hosting service. More dollars... not to mention more projects to deal with since your new site will need updated content on a regular basis... otherwise it'll look like any other dummy domain. Furthermore, I'd question the fact that this process might delute that trust factor that you're after, since it's being redirected through yet another site.

[buckworks]

Try cultivating links to internal pages sometimes, not just the home page.

If new links are pointing to something other than your home page, it would be a bit harder for competitors to spot them, and you'd still have the benefit of PR, trust and other goodies.

[burcot]

Thanks for the input guys.

goubarev. On reflection i think you are right. If i point lot's of links to a domain that in turn links to me, then i suppose i only gain one link.

MrStitch. I didn't mean buying new domains and developing them. Buying existing mature sites has been very succesful in the past, problem is finding them.

[burcot]

buckworks.That sounds too good to be true.

If i search...link:mysite.com/ would links to /some-other-page.htm not show?

[inbound]

Yahoo linkdomain: command will reveal all links to your site (or at least the ones Yahoo cares about), but the advice about links to internal pages is still good due to Google liking that.

[Serpent]

On the downside, your competitor may be cashing in on your hard work, but only after your links have been posted and had a little bit of time to mature. your links will always be older than his, and should therefore be "stronger" than his.

You could also make it more difficult for others to follow you by informing the webmaster of the highest price you would have paid for the link, so that anyone buying links after you may have to pay more than you did.