How Keyword Thieves Steal Your Google Rankings

As a citizen of the internet world, you must have seen a lot of silly behaviors people boldly display, especially theft: stealing tweets, user profiles, personal stories, business ideas, and more. People also steal on the eCommerce side of the internet, and keyword poaching, a type of website scraping, is common among digital marketers. The ultimate goal of these bold keyword thieves is to generate traffic, or clout, as people say on social media. Right now, there might be people lurking and checking your web pages against SEO tools to collect data about your keywords and perform an analysis to discover which keywords you rank for.

How Digital Marketers Steal Your Keywords and Google Rankings

Thieving digital marketers use SEO tools such as Shine and Ahrefs to steal your keywords. These tools were meant for business owners/digital marketers to see how their websites perform by giving them access to the website analytics, which includes features like site explorer and organic keywords. But keyword poachers use their SEO tools to peek at other people’s websites, particularly rivals. Here’s how a keyword thief can poach your keywords:

• They copy and paste your website URL into the site explorer feature of an SEO tool.
• The site explorer reveals your website analytics to them.
• Next, they use the organic keywords feature to see all the keywords your website is ranking for.
• They use filters to fish out the keywords with the most search volume or monthly traffic.

They can use filters to determine the difficulty level of your top-ranking keywords. They can also automatically make a list of your top-ranking keywords with low competition. With all that data, they can write better articles to use the keywords and outrank your website, stealing your traffic and affiliate marketing income. And that’s just awful.

Why You Should Be Concerned About Keyword Theft

Keyword poachers typically steal keywords from new websites in their first or second year based on the ease of dominating with their keywords as a website with bigger domain authority. They know they can outrank new websites with lower domain authority using the same keywords.

Keyword poaching can slow down the growth of your website, especially in its early stages. When your paid and unpaid SEO efforts are beginning to generate awareness, traffic, and sales, poachers may lurk and take advantage of your efforts.

How to Protect Your Website From Keyword Thieves

Even if your website has lower domain authority, there are a few things you can do to protect it:

• Publish outstanding content
• Use code to prevent poachers from easily copying your website
• Set up complicated honeytraps
• Use cookies to track user engagement and detect unusual activities

Publish Outstanding Content

Make it difficult for keyword thieves to outrank your content:

• Write long-form, original content (2000+ words)
• Use relevant data, surveys, statistics, and original research
• Incorporate high-quality visuals (images, memes, gifs, videos)
• Implement SEO best practices
• Ensure content is error-free and personalized with your brand’s voice

Use Code to Protect Your Website from Keyword Poachers

Insert the following CSS code to disable content copying:

body {
user-select: none;
}

Add it via WordPress dashboard > Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS, then paste the code and publish.

Set Up Complicated Honeytraps

Hire an expert if needed. Honeytraps help detect and block scraping attempts. Key tactics include:

• Monitoring analytics for unusual activity
• Blocking suspicious IPs
• Using CAPTCHAs and changing HTML regularly
• Including fake data and using anti-scraping software
• Rate limiting access to prevent mass scraping

You can also file DMCA takedowns against content theft, though this won’t work for stolen keywords.