Website 'stolen', no contact details
-
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
-
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
-
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!
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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!
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
-
Does changing content and design of the website gonna affect my all the backlinks i have made till now
i have been working on my link profile for a month now, after learning about 5 step moz methodology i have decided that i would like to change all of the content of my site and taylor it to what my customers need, am i gonna loose all the domain authority if make changes? if it gonna affect, hows that gonna come out
Web Design | | calvinkj0 -
Best practice for product detail when all products are onepage
HI there,
Web Design | | Hephey
I have a page utilizing isotope with multiple products with small text excerpts and when you click an item i opens a detailed view without requiring a new page load. I've read some of the one page posts but can't get my head around what's best SEO wise when dealing with possible duplicate content. I guess one method could be to have the product list with small excerts of text and all the details hidden in some json and then when the user clicks it, it will open the product and fill with details from inline json. The click action is overring the a tag action e.g. with jquery, so the the a tag has a clean url to a proper subpage with meta, h1 and all that stuff so google can follow it. The jquery thing enables the navigation without a page reload and I can update the document url with pushState.
The subpage, if visited directly, includes the same animation stuff as the master but now has h1, p meta specific to that product but still with same effect, navigation and layout as the master page. Does anybody know if there is a better way to do this with one page sites when wanting to seo optimize detailed contents?0 -
Wordpress or custom built website?
Hello fellow mozzers, Hope you are all well. I am looking to get a website done and I am struggling to decide whether to get a custom build website site done or a website built on the WordPress platform. Would you be able to share your experiences and advice/suggestions on what you would use, and why? (pros and cons, etc.) Thanks in advance. Kind Regards
Web Design | | JonathanRolande0 -
Any advice for best practice for mobile versions of websites?
Hi Mozzers, I am looking to develop a mobile version of one of my sites and was wondering what was considered best practice for the following: Where to host it: m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile ? Is rel='canonical' enough to avoid mobile version being indexed or should I use "noindex" on mobile version? How to handle tablets? Which screen size sees mobile version? Which sees full site version? Thanks in advance Geoff
Web Design | | SEM-Freak1 -
What are some of the best website hosting platforms for Wordpress?
I'm looking for a new hosting provider and have been told to find one that specializes in Wordpress hosting because of higher page speed load times, etc.. Can anyone recommend a couple of Wordpress Hosting providers
Web Design | | webestate0 -
Need some advice on changing website around.
I want to make some changes to my personal website and need a little help. I originally hired someone to create this site for me several years ago. Most of the site (including the home page) is html, but the blog part (/blog) is wordpress. The main site hasn't been updated in a few years (although the blog has been updated more often.) I'm not really targeting any keywords on my site (other than just my name) so I'm not really concerned about loosing any rank or anything. I"m just curious what the best route to go should be. Would you suggest keeping the site's format "as is" so to speak? (make the front page a landing page so to speak that links to my various sites, a little bio, etc; keep an about page, contact, /blog, etc...? ) Or should I go the more traditional route and make the blog the front page? Another route is to someone keep the most recent (1,2,or 3) posts on the home page (landing page) and sort of make it a landing page / recent post page. It's sort of like that now, only the main page just links to the most recent post instead of actually adding the post, if that makes sense. There maybe some themes out there that would work well, so feel free to suggest one if you know one that would work. I think the Aboutme.com pages look pretty nice and will let you use a custom domain, but I'm not sure. (And it's not a complete theme, so not sure that's the best option.) Thanks!
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Can't figure out what's going on with these strange 403's
The last crawl found a good number of 404's and I can't figure out what's going on. I don't even recognize these links. What's really strange is a few of them high a fairly decent page authority. For instance this one has a PA of 55: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http%3A%2F%2Feurosystems.it%2Fconf_commerciale%2Fimages%2Fdd.gif%3F%3F There are several more like this one also, it seems most of these new ones have "Feurosystems" in the link...I have no idea what that is. Just curious what you guys think is going on, why these are 404'ing, and how to fix it. Thanks. Edit: I took out the "%" from the links and I get this: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http3A2F2Feurosystems.it2Fconf_commerciale2Fimages2Fdd.gif3F3F which takes me to a page on my site. I have no idea what's going on, or what that link is. Hoping someone can chime in because this is strange. Another edit: I just checked out the Google Webmaster's and it looks like these errors are 403's and all started around March 21st. I have no idea what happend on March 21st to start causing all of these errors, but I'd sure like to get it fixed. 🙂
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Where is the best place to put reciprocal links on our website?
Where should reciprocal links be placed on our website? Should we create a "Resources" page? Should the page be "hidden" from the public? I know there is a right answer out there! Thank you for your help! Jay
Web Design | | theideapeople0