Why The Enterprise Needs
Defensive Search Strategies
Any enterprise with high ranks needs to consider this reality - that
having high ranks by itself imparts some danger by the huge amount of
attention those ranks attract.
High ranks for any really competitive term means that
(1) your site has been copied, and
(2) others will attempt to benefit from your ranks, and that effort can be harmful.
Knowing this can help you devise some enterprise-wide protocols for dealing with the issues created by your ranking success.
For example, since we know from (1) above that your site will be
copied, you can create content that can't be used by competitors
without having to revise it. Using branding elements within the body of
your articles will do this if you have enough of them interspersed
throughout. That way, competitors can still copy from your site, but to
use it on their sites will require some revision, and the revision
results in content that is no longer redundant with yours.
But how do you defend against rivals that covet your ranks? And first of all, how can anyone affect your ranks?
The answers may surprise you. When a third party attacks your ranks,
your site is not attacked - directly at least. Instead, the attacker
either triggers a Google penalty. In the cases we studied, the victim
site was either penalized by nefarious inbound links, or was penalized
and then replaced by the attacking site in Google's index (proxy hack).
