Website 'stolen', no contact details

[GrumpyCarl]

Hi all,

Wondering if anyone could help out here, good a very strange issue....

Went into Google Webmaster Tools and looked at the incoming links to a client's site (new client, only just gained access to WMT) and noticed 2563 links coming from a domain. Upon viewing said domain it is a 100% copy of the clients site, I mean 100%; the phone numbers, email address etc are still pointing to the client's site.

Everything is the same, the pages, the navigation etc. When I click on a link on the copy site it loads the same pages but at their site, the internal linking points to the version of the pages on their site.  It seems to be an ongoing thing because the last time the client updated their blog was last week and this is on the copy site.

Obviously this cannot be helping with regard to seo. The client knows nothing about it so not come from them. The copy site is indexed in Google!!.

The first thing to do is to contact these people and ask what they are doing. This is proving to be easier said than done, the contact details (as mentioned above) on the pages still point back to the client and the whois gives no details.

What would be the first step to take here? Obviously there is the whole legal area about stolen content but that can wait until we have the site down and out of Google. Is there somewhere in Google to report things such as this?

I will speak to client and if they are happy I will share both the domains in question, they know I am seeking alternative opinions

Many thanks

Carl

[GrumpyCarl]

Thanks for the reply. We went down the route of blocking the other domains from accessing the server in the end. Hopefully the duplicate versions of the website won't cause too much trouble.

One thing am considering is adding the domains to webmaster tools and removing them from google, that should help with duplicate content issues.  If they are pointing to our server and accessing our files then we may as well exploit that for a webmaster tools verification action

[Everett]

Grumpy C,

Though this is new to you I can assure you that it is a VERY common issue we find in the SEO world. In other words, get used to it.

A cross-domain rel canonical tag should fix you right up, but in the long run I'd look into 301 redirecting or just removing those other domains:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

We used to call these "mirrored domains" which may help you when searching for more information on them. One thing I find useful in locating mirrors is called a "Reverse IP Lookup". You can find free tools all over the place for this. Here's one: http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/ . Before you get all freaked out when using this tool remember that shared hosting is very common so having multiple sites on the same IP is fine. What is not fine is if there are several of the SAME sites out there, as you are now dealing with.

Good luck!

[GrumpyCarl]

Thanks will look into that. Would be so much easier if this client owned all the domains, they all seem to be owned by different people and not linked to each other in any way

[Sarbs]

We had exactly the same issue with a client. They had simply re-hosted their site under at least 10 other domain names they owned in the misguided perception that this would improve their SEO.

They were all hosted on the same server as your latest response seems to state, and we tracked them all down by doing a reverse IP lookup using this tool.

We then had to ammend the clients DNS records for the duplicate sites and 301 them to the true site. The same site later recieved a link penalty and we then parked those domains ratyher than redirected.

[GrumpyCarl]

Thanks for the responses, everyone. The situation gets even more random. It would appear that the content is not stolen, but rather the 'copy' domain (and indeed two more, at least) are not only pointing to client's server but also the same directory as their site. The are all loading the same files!!! Must admit, this is a new one to me.

The client IT dept claim so far...they purchased a new ip for their server and are using that. The previous ip used to belong to another host, so it appears, and there were sites pointed to that ip. When the ip was moved to client's site the sites pointing to it now point to the new server. This is just about understandable, how these domains are accessing the files on the server is a mystery. It's a windows server so not my area of expertise.

Oddly enough the two domains which seem to have had their server moved are registered for another 3 years still, so one would assume they are wanted domains, whoever owns them

It's definitely been an interesting Tuesday morning so far!!! Still the afternoon to come so I wonder how many more websites can find sharing client's files!!

Not sure where this leaves me now with regard to calling it spam/theft. All the domains appear to be resolving to exactly the same place,yet only one of them is owned by the client.

[PaddyDisplays]

you could also contact the hosting company of the site, they might take down the site for you, or  aleast contact the fake site owner

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Carl,

Auch, this is probably not a use case you ever wanted to fix for you clients. However I would suggest filing a DCMA request based on the copyright of your texts/ images used on your client site. This will, hopefully, at least remove the copied site out of Googles index.

Filing such a request could be done here: http://support.google.com/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1114905&page=ts.cs

Good luck!