Outranking the big boys, how to protect position?

[xoffie]

Hi

We're an affiliate travel site, and not only are we outranking the site who provides the rates, we're also outranking some of the very big travel companies that provide rates to them.

Of course, that's great. But it's also worrying, following the advice of SEOMOZ to the letter we've managed to acheive great ranking for product names and even cities/place, we've got 100% unique content (the affiliate site offer XML but we haven't taken it) with our own pictures, reviews and videos, but is this going to be enough?

I'm concerned that, outrank these bigger companies on enough keywords and they will either a) complain to google or b) stop providing us with rates.

What steps should I take in this situation? I feel it is our "competitors" job to up their game, rather than for us to try to sail under the radar, but unfortunately and I've been involved in SEO where this has happened before, if you start to rank well, they'd rather pull the plug on you than up their game.

Is there any advice out there on this type of thing, how I can at least stay in Google's good books if a competitor does decide we don't "deserve" our ranking?

[Sean_Dawes]

Well the question I am curious to get an answer to is why would google not think you deserve the rank? Are you doing black hat techniques?

Outside of that, the big boys can just yank the plug of information from you to hurt your business but that is the fine line you play near when your business involves using information from a competitor.

[xoffie]

Hi Sean

No, absolutely no black hat whatsoever, but as an affiliate perhaps Google wouldn't want us to outrank the original supplier of the rates?

And in answer to your second comment, we don't use the information from a competitor at all, what we do, is use the rates provided from the publisher (so for example, we don't use content from Delta airlines but we have their rates for flights).

However, you are right in that a publisher can pull the plug on affiliate for just marketing better than them. Annoying though, we put a lot of time and effort into our rankings to sell their products... for them to pull the plug for doing it too well.