Best way to oust a competing forum?

[nitra1000]

So there is a competing forum that laid it's hands on a domain name and links to it a long time ago....

Because it already has links from the sites in my area I am struggling to get links to my own.

It hasn't managed to get any more than a few members but it is a nusance (I'm one below it in google when googling "XYZ Forum")

There domain is XYZforum.co.uk and mine is XYZtalk.net

Is there anything I can do to remedy this (other than offering him some £££ for the domain)?

I've been thinking as there is only 795 topics on his forum of copying and rewriting them all in a hidden forum on my own site, as his long tail SEO sucks his visits will plumet as my long tail searchs come above him by quite a margin.

Is this wise?

After I have done this I figure I can repeat the process over a couple of months, and then offer to buy his forum.

[Brian Cummiskey]

A hidden forum is not accessible to bots, so it is a waste of time to do that.

You can certainly outrank a small site. You just need to try harder.

Figure out where he comes above you, and why. what terms are you searching against that aren't showing on your site?

[nitra1000]

Unforunately the only term they outrank me on is "xyz forum" (there domain is xyzforum.co.uk then they have all there links as xyz forum)

It provides the most targetted traffic so its really important to hit the no1 spot.

Why is a hidden forum not accessable by bots, if people know the url it's still accessable... would of assumed feeding the link to google then hiding would work.

[melbo]

How many people per month search on the term "xyz forum" I would doubt that that is a useful serp to win, concentrate on your deep indexing. Most of my traffic comes into a thread buried somewhere in my forum and they don't care if they are visiting xyz or abc, so long as the thread they land on is relevant.