Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
As this company aquires our competitors they purposely hide information from Google and setup the websites to look as if they are ran out of the US but they infact are owned and operated by a single Chinese company.
At my last count they have bought out over 300 of our competitors.
What is really crazy is they now pretty much own the serps page 1-10 for millions of keywords/phrases because of the deception they are playing with Google by keeping the sites siloed.
I did some quantcast research and we are talking about 50-100 million visitors a month spread across these properties so I am sure Google is aware of this but given how much they are making with them I am not to sure they are going to do anything about it.
They have approached us several times to sellout and each time we have declined but as time goes on it is becoming clear that out of hundreds of sites like ours we are just about the last American holdout.
We cant scale to the cheap labor they employ and they churn out content at a pace that is blinding. It's a strange feeling watching sites that have been competitors of ours for over a decade fall one at a time.
What would you folks do if every competitor of yours in google was basically bought out by a single chinese company?
At first glance it certainly appears greedy to buy out so many sites. But looked at in a different angle, is McDonalds greedy to have a restaurant in virtually every neighborhood of every city in the U.S.A.? Is it necessary for a company to underutilize their resources?
Some of my sites are up against larger entities with more resources. Some of them are rewriting my content and ranking in the SERPs against me. What can I do? If Starbucks moves into a neighborhood does that mean the local cafe is in trouble? Not necessarily.
This is an interesting discussion issue you've brought up. I don't think the issues are as black and white as they might appear to be.
What would you folks do if every competitor of yours in google was basically bought out by a single chinese company?
In this case, all you need to do is figure out how to differentiate yourself against *1* competitor, instead of 300 competitors. It will depend on your industry, but there are almost always certainly ways it can be done.
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 ;)
A well written documated letter showing proof of what your stating to the right person will work wonders. The documated proof has to be good with examples, serp examples, screen shots, and a step by step documated trail of your findings will be needed in the email or letter.
I know first hand what your talking about.
Small can mean
Larger can mean the opposite.
# Astronomical maintenance costs that can overwhelm a company if the beast can't be fed
