SIte cloned my entire website and is now outranking me
-
My site is http://www.medic8.com and http://www.mealldubh.org has cloned my site and is now outranking my site.
I have submitted DMCA requests to Google with no response.
I do not know what to do now but surely it should be obvoius that this site has cloned me and there must be a way to have this scraper removed from the index?
Im lost in terms of what I can do next so any help would be greatly appreacited.
-
yeah i think contacting the linking sites would just be far too time consuming and take too long to impact the site. Its crazy how a expired domain can just clone a site and start ranking so well. MY site has some decent authority in the health sector but its been taken over by this one!
-
As I look deeper into this, I think Visiblics has got it. firstdvs.ru is clearly a hosting provider, and they specialize in VPS servers, which it definitley looks like this guy is using.
Their website includes mention of the following:
Illegal activity of users
Department dealing with the issues of illegal activity of our users. If you know of violations of law or our terms of service on the part of our customers, please let us know.
E - mail: abuse@firstvds.ru
Looks like that's your best shot.
Paul
-
Fully agree re getting Cutts's attention - but you never know what might catch his eye. See if you can "hook" him
Paul
-
And just so you know... the reason the cloned site is outrranking you is because it's been built on a recently-expired domain that had really high domain authority from its original owner's site.
It was the personal blog of a guy who was very active in the open-source community and so had a large number of influential incoming links.
The good news (what little there is) is that the original site had absolutely nothing to do with health care, and the links are predominantly using his name as the anchor text, so the search engines "should" start to devalue that site over time as the ranking signals are now irrelevant to the current site.
If you really have time on your hands, you could collect some of the more significant pages hosting incoming links and ask them to remove the link as it's now spam. Many likely would, but it would be time-consuming.
Paul
-
hey paul thanks for this ill give that a shot, im sure matt cutts gets a lot of direct tweets ... will probably be lost in space but worth a shot i guess
-
According to www.whoishostingthis.com and Domain Tools, IP address is owned by ISPSystem, cjsc in Irkutsk, which likely means they also host the server. The site is hosted on a server with only 6 other sites, so it likely means the thief is using his own dedicated server or VPS
IP Address:82.146.43.144 Reverse-IP | Ping | DNS Lookup | Traceroute ASN: AS29182 IP Location: - Irkutsk - Irkutsk - Ispsystem Cjsc
Russian hosting providers aren't known for being especially responsible for taking down copyright infringement, but it's definitely worth sending them a DMCA request while you're waiting for the Search Engines to take notice. Problem of course is Russia isn't bound by the DMCA.ISPsystem
PoBox 30
664017 Irkutsk
RUSSIAN FEDERATIONphone: +74956681264
fax: +73952525096
e-mail: noc (at) ispsystem (dot) net
The other thing you can try is posting about the issue in the Google Webmaster Central forums - that's occasionally been known to get attention to the takedown request quicker.
And hey, a direct tweet to Matt Cutts wouldn't hurt either
Good luck.
Paul -
just saw this reply thanks I will look into this
-
My site has been live more than 8 years i noticed this clone about 3 months ago.
I have the registrant details from the domain tools search and i have tried emailing the contact on here without response.
But how do I find out who the hosting company is?
-
May be this company is hosted with:firstvds.ru
You can report this issue to abuse@firstvds.ru
More details can be found here: http://centralops.net/co/
HOpe this helps
-
You could also try domaintools.com - it offers whois, reverse-ip, ping, DNS lookup, and traceroute. I can definitely understand that Google is your priority but they tend to take a little while to respond, so rest assured that they'll get round to it.
-
When did you make this website live? and when did you notice that they have cloned your website?
However, there is nothing to worry, it takes time to DMCA to respond to all the queries, You can also touch base with their hosting company to report about this issue, and directly email them as well.
Report this issue to Google as well. But Google is smart enough to track such frauds if your site content and design is older than the other website, sooner or later it will dropped in rankings.
-
Thanks for your reply, Everything terminates in russia from my whois lookups and cant find details of who hosts the site. Have tried DMCA to google but will give the same approach to other search engines a try my main concern however is Google.
-
Hi there, I would:
- Send DMCA notifications to the other major search engines and any web directories this site is listed on. This should get the site de-indexed.
- Send a DMCA notification to the Webmaster's ISP. This should get the site taken down,
Good luck.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why does a site that is worse than mine by every objective measure I can find, keep outranking me in search?
I’ve been working on educating myself about SEO all day, again. All-Star Telescope up in Canada. We have a competitor that consistently ranks #1 and I don't get it. Their site is full of duplicate content (straight copy and paste from the manufacturer site). They don't have any meaningful blog or video content to add relevance or value to their site. We have higher page authority, higher domain authority, and they keyword analyzer in moz says that our page is higher quality than the the competitors page. Our site is slow, but theirs is slower. I can’t find a single metric on any tool (ubbersuggest, Moz, ahrefs, semrush) that says Telescopes Canada is a better site, or has a better NexStar 8SE product page (a popular telescope). Here’s the link to Telescope Canada’s page for their Celestron 8SE: https://telescopescanada.ca/products/celestron-nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope-11069?_pos=1&_sid=f0aa91cc2&_ss=r Here’s a link to the Celestron 8SE page from the manufacturer website: https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope?_pos=1&_sid=56abdabd4&_ss=r#description Telescopes Canada has just copied and pasted. There is no original content aside from adding the shipping and return policy to the tab, and having some options for selecting accessories on the page. Here is our page: https://all-startelescope.com/products/celestron-nexstar-8se Our titles are good, our metadata is good (but I don’t think that’s been a serious ranking factor for about ten years). The text is original, it’s relevant, we have healthy internal links to the page. We have invensted in some excellent blog content, we’re adding new products to the website so that we rank for more keywords. All of those things are helping, but I fundamentally don’t understand why Telescopes Canada is #1 almost across the board on every key product in our market. There is something that I’m not seeing here, something that isn't being captured by the tools that I have. Is it simple the fact that they get more traffic? Is that why some people go and buy traffic? Can you see any metric, any tool in your toolbox that indicates why they rank at the top, or even higher than we do for in these search terms specific to that product: Celestron NexStar 8SE
Technical SEO | | nkennett
NexStar 8SE
Celestron NexStar 8SE Canada
NexStar 8SE Canada We've worked with two highly ranked SEO's to try and figure this out, one in Canada, and one in the USA. I haven't seen a confidence inspiring answer from either of them. Posting on a forum is a bit of an act of desperation, I'll continue to work the problem, but it's discouraging to see the leader in my industry look like he's just phoning it in with his website.1 -
Why did my website DA fell down?
Hello, Could you please let me know why might my website's DA have fallen down in merely a week? What might be a reason? I also noticed traffic from google dropped down at the very same week. Will be very thankful for any advise!
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Launch of improved site
Hi, Just want to ask you guys if i have missed something in my planning. We have done a migration from Ithemes Exchange to woocommerce. The complete migration are done on our dev server. It has an exakt setup as our live one. My plan is to change our live version with a backup from our migrated and finished site from our dev site. All of our product links will be intact with accept from some that we have combined in to new ones, the ones that are changed has been redirected with a 301. Will this way of launching our site effect our ranking/seo in some way? Thankful for any thoughts about this one! // Jonas
Technical SEO | | knubbz0 -
Mobile site backlinks?
Hello, Our mobile site redirects to desktop in a desktop browser and vice versa; however, they are different sites. This said, shouldn't the backlinks for our mobile site be the same as for our desktop site since one redirects to the other. We show no backlinks in my analysis? Any help or insight would be extremely appreciated! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1 -
Why does my site rank so badly
its my turn to ask the interminable question why does my site rank so badly? site is: marriagerecords.org.uk. it was #1 for 'marriage records' on google for about 6 months. then it was 5th to 10th for about 2 months. now it is nowhere for this phrase and anything else, none of the pages I have written rank for anything. I have spent hours upon hours researching original content and I have got some great backlinks from sites like wrexham.gov.uk and somerset.gov.uk (some dont show in opensiteexplorer yet). im guessing im over-optimizing something but i'd love some concrete fixes if anyone could suggest any. thanks, tom
Technical SEO | | lethal0r0 -
Moving an eCommerce Site to Wordpress
I'm evaluating moving an established eCommerce I own over to a WordPress based site with a woocommerce plugin. My question is, does the added /category/ slug hurt SEO rankings at all?
Technical SEO | | CobraJones950 -
What is wrong with my site?
I have been working hard for over two months on my sites in seomoz and have seen some nice results in some (www.etraxc.com/ and www-my-etraxc.com for instance. Still I am really frustrated by www.classroomconnection.us/. I cant even get on the first page with the search term "classroom connection." i would love some help on this one. On a related note, does it help to have links to YouTube videos about the content? If so, how do I ensure that this piece is working well for me? Thanks a ton!
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Looking to hire someone to help on my website. On page issues with subpages outranking homepage
Hello, I have a site that has been doing good for quite a while now. But lately I'm running into issues with on page seo. I have ranked well for long periods of time, but changes like adding content or moving stuff around has bumped me out of the rankings. I would prefer not to publicly disclose the site. My main keyword I rank for is "word1 word2". I notice if I do a site: search for "word1 word2" homepage is #1, site search for just word1 it's #1 as well, but the word2 returns a category listing above the homepage. I noticed this happen right as I fell back from the rankings. I am looking to hire an SEO profession to help me out with on page issues. I've come to admit that I just don't understand something about this and I need help from someone who has a lot of experience with this. I was hoping to find recommendations by people here for a company I could hire for this. I would want to pay no more than $1,000. I hope that budget is high enough to get a skilled individual/company working with me. I'm not sure where to search for online to get a skilled on page seo professional, so I thought a personal recommendation from someone here would possibly be able to help. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nux0