Why The Enterprise Needs Defensive Search Strategies

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).