Big sites stealing my keywords… can I stop this

AhFreshMeat

AhFreshMeat

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I struck gold on several keywords that nobody has even touched yet. Not even small sites. These keywords were bringing in a ton of cash for me each month.

i formulated these kws based on my micro expertise in the niche im in. I’m very proud of the level of creativity I was able to not only generate but execute on.

it’s not all rainbow and unicorns though, a few large authority sites have been laser focused on my keywords.

the most damaging part of all of this is they put in quite literally no research. These monsters have essentially copied my hard, in the field, masters degree level research and ranked above me instantly.

I speculated that they were able to find these keywords due to ahrefs.

is there anyway to stop this? Is blocking ahrefs and sem rush from crawling my site really practical when I use it so often for link building, tracking progress, and keyword tracking myself?

anyone ever deal with this? It hits home on a personal level when they didn’t even build upon my research to make it their own. They are literally stealing in a sense. Which I’m aware is expected, and I guess on some level, flattering
 
You cannot do anything about it, except maybe building links and optimizing your article to rank better for the specific keywords.

Competition can swoop on you with minimal cost in this industry, and that is indeed a risk. You just have to prepare yourself for it by building a bigger and more authoritative website.

And if their articles are indeed crappier than yours, then a future Google update could help you rank above theirs. It's a lot of praying and waiting.
 
Hard to beat Nike on a keyword like “best shoes for parkour” or something like that.

I’m not in the shoe niche, just giving an example. here.

My point: If nobody has ever published a post with a certain keyword in the title since the internet was born. then I make a post on it, then big sites immediately jump on it… then there’s gotta be ahrefs to blame. Otherwise there’s no way it would pop up besides google autosuggest or google somewhere… but if that’s the case then how would these guys know it’s even worth going after without a traffic score of some sort.

Hard to beat big sites in authority as big as say, Nike, that’s the size of whom I’m up against.
 
Another possibility is their domain/URL is showing up in a SERP tracker (SERPWoo) in the bottom positions under yours and they got an alert they aren't in the top position.

As well Google search console can shows them in lower positions for those terms and they realized they can target it.

Or they are doing a competitive deep dive on your domain once one of their researchers found it and realized you had a low DR.

There are literally hundreds of blogposts written since 2008 era on how to steal and outrank your competitors' weaker domains.

Blocking ahrefs and semrush blocks them from crawling your site, on-page wise. It won't stop them from reporting off-page factors like links pointing to you or your ranking in the SERPs.

But blocking those bots from crawling your site gives you the advantage of not having your on-page data within their database so their customers can do deep analysis of it. It's why I highly recommend it.

If anyone is competent they'll be doing research within their industry and find gems like your without a problem.

How to stop it? How does a prey get not eaten by a wolf? Out run it. And if you know anything about wolves... you can't.

"The Romans, raised by wolves, see a guy turn water into wine, what do they do? They eat him, cause there are no saints in the animal kingdom - only breakfast and dinner."​

Your pride doesn't mean anything out in the jungle. Being the smartest guy in the room doesn't mean anything, it's being able to survive and thrive the jungle.
 
CCarter said:
But blocking those bots from crawling your site gives you the advantage of not having your on-page data within their database so their customers can do deep analysis of it. It's why I highly recommend it.
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Is there any way to reliably block Ahrefs & Semrush bots?
 
breedingsuccess said:
Is there any way to reliably block Ahrefs & Semrush bots?
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These days most directives by these crawlers are borderline ignored - or they have ways to circumvent them. I used to a see a ton on my PBNs before I stopped giving a shit (Majestic / Mj12Bot) is a good example.

Fairly certain @CCarter was one of the folks to create the popular .htaccess directives of ages past but a lot of these tools have pages on their crawlers as well as ways to block them.

semrushbot: https://www.semrush.com/bot/

Which lists the bots for their various tools. You could also just straight up email Semrush or a similar tool and say "hey - is there a reliable way to block You from crawling my site?" - They'd know more about blocking their bot than us.
 
If you think you're being plagiarized, don't be afraid to contact them and tell them so, sometimes it can be an easy backlink. Just contact them and say not cool bro, you plagiarized me and you didn't give me credit. Be mad, don't threaten, but let them know they're being assholes. Make sure to have a sig to any SoMe you have so they know you can put them on blast.

It does depend on if they actually plagiarized your content or just your keyword. I would write them and call them if they used as much as a line from you that was original content. Doesn't have to be word for word, anything they used that you researched is plagiarism without a source.

That would be my approach.

If they didn't plagiarise and just put up shit content, then double down and improve your content more, get some graphics going and get some videos going and get to sharing it more on SoMe. It will eventually outrank after enough pogo-stick searches on the top dogs.
 
Pick up their brand tail keywords and run the tools back on them. Big guys have more shit to steal.
 
It's the game. I had a competitor that was a niche site where a few of my categories matched their site, and they thought they were being cute copying every single one of my posts in those categories immediately after I posted. Within a week they had their similar version rewritten.

Eventually I found out, you know. They were popping up an Ahrefs as similar sites. So I took every single one of their posts and wrote my own versions. It was a lot of work but it had to be done on principal. Their domain was weaker than mine and after about a 2 years I had successfully slashed their traffic in half.

To do this to big sites won't be easy but you can definitely grab all their lower competition keywords and hurt them that way, and get free keyword research done, basically. You just have to be able to move fast to cover your normal work and add destroying them to your workflow too. It's dog eat dog and an eye for an eye out here.
 
Honestly I hate this more than anything in this business, because I am in smaller market and if you create some good content, then essentially it's a 1 year rental and then you have 20 copycats and Google just loves to rank them above you purely because of domain strength.
 
bernard said:
Honestly I hate this more than anything in this business, because I am in smaller market and if you create some good content, then essentially it's a 1 year rental and then you have 20 copycats and Google just loves to rank them above you purely because of domain strength.
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Had this myself. You have to ideate the canonical, then wait for the whole lot to be paraphrased.

This is when selling makes a lot of sense IMO. I did this with an R&R site, selling with max traffic, and now watching the copycats claw that traffic back. The original site still outranks, but you can't keep it all to yourself forever.
 
illmasterj said:
This is when selling makes a lot of sense IMO.
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My business plan was this, sold my first site in year 3, planned to sell all my sites in year 3 as well, but become of the current shitty situation, my sites have lost like 60-70% of their value (affiliate), and now I'm stuck trying to increase their value and EAT so I can recoup sale value.

Pretty shitty, but I guess I will learn from this. Finally got around to email collecting.

illmasterj said:
You have to ideate the canonical
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What do you mean by this?
 
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