Hi Aurthur,

If I understand you correctly, you have positioning in the natural listings (finally), but the PPC costs have went through the roof (again). In the past when this happened (without the support of good natural listings positioning), your response was to modify the URL for your domain, and perhaps a reason you never achieved good "natural" positioning before. Then when the PPC costs slid back down, you went back to pursuing PPC traffic.

And if I understand you correctly, its happened again, except now you have good "natural" positioning, but you're still wanting to continue pursuing the PPC traffic as well(?), without upsetting the boat.

Ok, this leads me to ask, "Why?" Are you not satisfied with your traffic from the natural listings? The way I see it, you should be pleased that you're no longer reliant on PPC. And you CERTAINLY wouldn't want to tip the boat over by putting up another site with duplicate content.

Sure, you might be able to do some PPC on another site and go about turning away Google's spiders... sidestepping the duplicate content issue, but that's a big maybe and it sounds pretty RISKY as well as difficult, since you'd have to block the spiders from every possible entryway to the new site (every single page that can be linked to externally, I think).

Instead, I can see putting up a supporting site, one where you pursue PPC traffic, but I wouldn't fill it up with duplicate content and hope Google didn't figure it out. Instead, I'd place some unique and supportive content on the new site, with ample supporting links to your existing site. I don't know the nature of your site or your visitors interests, but it would seem to me you should be able to have both sites offer something UNIQUE, worthwhile, and stimulate traffic between the two without blasting yourself out of the water.

As for what's really happening, it sounds to me like your competition is waging a PPC war, causing your PPC costs to skyrocket, trying to kick you out of the PPC arena. I suspect it might just be a temporary thing, and the costs will soon decline again all on their own, once your competition relaxes a bit, just has it has in previous cases. I could be wrong on that, but I think its a reasonable conclusion. What do you think?