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Just to follow up on this, today the competitor's site has disappeared from Google.

Again one up for decency! Glad to see things like this being punished.

I get most of what you say, except that they have put betting in their subheads. When looking at "sportsbet" as a google.com.au search term, I really don't understand why they should be ranked SO far ahead of us.

Regarding the linking domains, again, it's just spam. The links aren't real natural ones, and I don't want to go down that road.

I'm really losing faith/interest, call it what you will, in this game when a site like this is, to me, pretty clearly using dodgy tactics and is having this success

When you say corresponding links, do you mean spam? External links?

Ok, here are the websites in question.

• My site: http://bit.ly/MvT3gI
• Competitior: http://bit.ly/N5fS0N

Here's an example of a search term that we are nowhere for - "sportsbet", and they are ranked around #4, which is a very good ranking: http://bit.ly/Mjwe4v

The rankings are very similarly good for all his pages which refer to each bookmaker. All have lots of Facebook likes and Google+.

The reason I think he's paid for the social likes is because the sites really aren't the sort to become viral, and get links in a "real" way.

Appreaciate any input into this!

Thanks for that. I'm not sure what the rules are regarding putting URLs on here? That's why I haven't put the addresses up yet.

I know the site hasn't got good real social interactions, purely because of the type of site it is. I'm 99% sure that the owner has gotten these likes/pluses through paying people to like/plus the site, or something similar.

I don't want to go along the lines of fighting fire with fire, but if it works as well as it appears to with their site, then it's sure tempting.

I run a website that's been ranked well for good keywords related to our business for some time. It was founded back in 2007 and has been there a while.

Recently a new site has popped up that ranks brilliantly for everything. It's a new site, and the only redeeming factor I can see is that it has an AddThis box showing the Facebook Likes and Google Plus Ones, and they are around 400 Facebook Likes and 80 Google+ (for every page that ranks).

Any other pages on their site which doesn't have any Facebook likes or Google Plus Ones, they don't rank.

Our site doesn't have any likes or pluses. Is this making the difference? I stress that other than this our sites are very similar, other than the fact we've been around over 5 years.

Thanks for your help Alan!

Ah, ok thanks Alan. I've added that into the htaccess now.

Do you think that will make much difference? You say they rank as different sites, but I've never seen them both (www and non-www) in the same list? Presumably then that would be because they are somehow being penalised for duplication...

Yeah I had read that, I just wasn't sure why our page was so much lower than the others, especially ones that didn't even seem to have any particularly strong links back from anything that looked particularly authoratitive.

Thanks for your advice Alan. I don't actually want to copy them as I have always believed doing the "correct" thing will work in the long term.

I've always thought to myself "if Google were watching me right now, would they approve of doing this" and if the answer were no, then it's not a good thing to do.

Regards the www, why is this an important issue? Is it regards "duplicate" content?