Unfair competition: we fall into the top-1 and lose customers

The day today was really crazy, one of the reasons - getting into the TOP-1 client site for the two most selling queries.

The promotion went smoothly, since July 2009, taking the old site in the promotion was engaged in it. The contract for website promotion was concluded on the TOP-10 Yandex search engine, but being at 7-10 places the customer asked to try to move the website higher, which was done without increasing the budget.

After a couple of months, we entered steadily in the TOP-3 for the main selling and traffic-generating requests, but as always I want more and here, the TOP-1 appeared .

You can rejoice - expensive equipment (from 1 to 7 thousand dollars + related products) is sold. The difference in calls is felt very strongly with each fluctuation of positions, as the client says, and the TOP-1 of the Yandex search system became immediately noticeable.

The joy lasted for nothing, about a week. On April 2, at 9 o'clock in the morning, the site was subjected to a DDOS-attack, as a result of the load, Masterhost turned off the site by 11 o'clock in the afternoon.

There was a Masterhost cap on the site - the site is disabled (by the way, why does the cap give code 200, but for example, not code 403?). Of course, immediately drop target traffic, and indeed any traffic

At lunch there was a call to the hosting support service - they explained the situation, took the go-ahead to transfer the site to quarantine (all foreign traffic and part of the Russian Federation was cut off), but apparently it did not give any sense - the site still does not work.

Of course - I fussed all day about this, as if I understand that the search engine will come and that's it - arividerchi But I did not expect such efficiency from Yandex. Today is April 3, we have an update, and what do we see in the saved copy of the main page?

Last time - the project re-indexing took several days, maximum 10. But this time, no luck - instantly all changes were indexed.

But today we have an update in Yandex

So the fruits came.

The calculation of the time of the attack, by the way was guessed incredibly accurate. Why is Friday morning?

• Lack of customers is understandable.
• Before the weekend - which means at least 3 days to re-index the project, almost with a guarantee.
• New work week will start without a major competitor in the TOP

That's it. Now the standard mechanism in this case is the payment of a certain organization of services to neutralize the DDOS attack. At the first stage, it is the filtering of traffic , the second stage is moving to a stable hosting .

Costs will increase by about 100-300 euros per month, which in principle is not commensurate with the losses incurred by the company, as well as with the costs of website promotion.

If you want to get into the top of the search engine, then be prepared:

• Reached the top - plundered content .
• Reached the top - get a surprise from a competitor .

As for the content, it is clear, it is generally desirable to change it 3 times a month (on the promoted pages), since really stolen at a wild pace, and very often - this is not only the work of satellite and random copies, but also of the competitors themselves.

Take care in advance about finding a company that will be professionally engaged in the analysis of such surprises. - believe, it is useful. DDOS, unfortunately, is very attractive in cost for such manipulations.

This situation is not so rare, in fact. In my practice, this is already the 3rd case , there is little pleasant, but the mechanism is more or less worked out (although each time not without surprises).

By the way - 4 of my regular customers asked for similar actions to be done with their competitors, I think many promoters faced with such offers and the customer’s willingness to pay any money, the main thing is that THIS is not a competitor in the search engine TOP. I have never agreed and will not agree to such proposals.