Just got an alert from Google showing 2 sites referencing "Camera Exchange San Antonio".  We are the only Camera Exchange in San Antonio, and currently rank #1 for this keyphrase; so I assume they're trying to steal our place in the serps.  The sites, besides having different URLs are almost exactly the same:
  www. yachtpaper. com/used-camera/links/camera_exchange_san_antonio_page_2.php
  thehowtogateway. com/used-camera/links/camera_exchange_san_antonio_page_1.php

Am I right in this assumption? Are there other concerns that I should have about this?  What options do I have to protect our site from this hijacking?  And do I need to hire Ryan to take care of it for me?

well the Yacht site is a POS (piece of #$R@!) - I couldn't even find it in Yahoo and finally barely found it through G

first off i don' tknow if anytone would take that site seriously- i'd think most would open it and run

i don't even know what that site is? what are they selling? anything? are they prmoting a store? if so where's the address? what am i even looking at?

you on the other hand have a well developed, well constructed site, that is relevant to the term "Camera Exchange San Antonio"

as far as being concerend i don't think you should be- as far as things to do, well....anyone is free to compete for terms- nothing anyone can do about that...just make sure yours is better and right now thats not even a questions

G'day Steven.

I, too, had a look at the first site. Very much a MFA site, huh?

I see they use a lot of borrowad content. RSS I s'pose, from news services.

A lot of these services allow their RSS to be used only in your own RSS aggregator, not republished on a website. Suggest you check out the copyright conditions on the sites. A little word in the right place may do the trick.

Regards,
Laurie.

Looking at the meta tags, I found something interesting.  Besides the fact that their keywords meta shows that this page is targeting two (and only two) of our key phrases.  The interesting thing is the author meta tag.

<meta name="keywords" content="camera exchange san antonio,used cameras" >

<meta name="author" content="Pat Lovell and Jon Atwood">

a quick google lookup comes up with:
theadsenseguys. com/course/seo-course. html

Why do I get the feeling that Gypsy would have a few choice words to say about these two?

When you're in a competitive and lucrative field (like selling cameras), it's only a matter of time before your company's name becomes a frequently searched keyword.  Once that happens, all the black hats are going to use that keyword in their auto-generated Adsense websites (as in this example).

On one side, you should feel good that your brand has reached a level to where competitors are using it.

On the other side, it really sucks!!!

Steven_A_S wrote:

Looking at the meta tags, I found something interesting.  Besides the fact that their keywords meta shows that this page is targeting two (and only two) of our key phrases.  The interesting thing is the author meta tag.

Code: html

<meta name="keywords" content="camera exchange san antonio,used cameras" >

<meta name="author" content="Pat Lovell and Jon Atwood">

a quick google lookup comes up with:
theadsenseguys. com/course/seo-course. html

Why do I get the feeling that Gypsy would have a few choice words to say about these two?

My ears are burning.... he he.... dood... it is simply some MFA crap and if those idiots were actually proud enough to put thier names on it.... it seems to be these guys; http://  adsenserealestate.com/are/

They seem to think MFAs are a legit business model.. more; http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=na … +Atwood%22

I dare say that;

1. Easy to outrank
2. They will have a HUGE bounce rate should they ever rank
3. they really aren't much to worry about... laugh at? Sure. Worry? nope....

Thanks for the reassurance, I kinda got that feeling when I looked up the authors' names.  Funny thing is that I couldn't seem to find any bad press on them through a google search like I had expected.

Guess I'll just do as Cory suggests and take it as a compliment that they tried.