Spammy Website Framed My Site & Stole Rankings
-
Hi
One of the pages of my website was starting to gather some real traction in Google rankings and hit 3500 visitors per day.
This is the page: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/drinking-apple-cider-vinegar-benefits/
On 11th January search traffic to this page fell to virtually 0. The rest of the site rankings were unaffected.
Yesterday I tried searching for some of the main keywords I was ranking for and instead of my search listing, this was appearing:
Image: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/weird-rankings.jpg
It is in the exact position I was ranking in, but instead this evn . moe site has stolen my ranking. Upon opening the website, it is simply my original article page in an iframe. If you look at the source code of the offending website, you will see what I mean.
Hopefully now you are getting a 403 forbidden error as my host blocked referrals from that site but they still hold my rankings.
Has anyone ever seen this before?
How was this done?
And how can I get my ranking back?
Thanks in advance,
James
-
There is no hard and fast answer to this. I've seen a DMCA request with Google take over a year to respond to, and I've seen it take a couple of months. Treat it as a marathon instead of a sprint. If you're lucky you'll be one of the ones whose case is examined and quickly rectified but expect this to take awhile.
-
Just to give an update on the situation.
I submitted a DMCA request here. As yet (5 days later) it has not been responded to but the offending domain has been offline for 3-4 days. Not sure who took it offline.
Still Google is ranking the offending domain instead of mine. In fact if you search for my exact URL (http://www.naturallivingideas.com/drinking-apple-cider-vinegar-benefits/) in Google, it still brings up the offending domain.
How long does it take for a site to be removed from the index once it goes offline?
James
-
@Kevin - Thanks. Is that this tool? https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard
@Greg - Thanks for the tip. As yet, no changes in ranking with only the 403 error.
@Paul - Thanks - my host have since implemented that line of code to prevent further problems.
@Brett - Thanks. I will do that and hopefully rankings will come back.
-
We're dealing with a similar issue here. Someone from Russia scraped our content and knocked us out of the SERP. Google sees a 200 status code but all others see 404.
We sent in a DMCA takedown request via https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard and it was responded to in less than a week (4 days). One caveat - make sure you have copyright ownership on that material. If you are an agency representing a client you may not have copyright and you may need to have them submit the request.
When you submit the request to Google and they verify it's legitimate they will remove the offending site from their search results. This is the only way to begin restoring your position.
You can contact their hosting provider and submit a takedown request with them as well. Provide evidence, and threaten legal action if they do not respond. Of course, Google has still indexed the other website, so you still need to submit a DMCA request with them to get your rankings back.
May the odds be ever in your favor.
-
The only sustainable way to protect a site from this kind of abuse is to implement the X_Origin security headers. These headers control whether any other sites are able to iframe content from your site. This protection should be applied to all sites, IMO.
Assuming your site is running on Apache and allows use of htaccess file, you add this line to your htaccess:
Header append X-FRAME-OPTIONS "SAMEORIGIN"
This determines that only other pages on your own domain can iframe your content. If you want extra protection, you can change "SAMEORIGIN" to "DENY" in which case no iframing at all will be possible. This directive can also be adjusted slightly to run in the httpd.conf file if you have root access and control of your server. This is vastly better than 403ing offenders after you have (hopefully) detected them, as it's proactive, Miscreants can't iframe you in the first place. Though they can of course still outright scrape the content. Hope that helps? (and that you get the rankings back after knocking the page content off the scammer's site.) Paul
-
caught my interest with this one, iframe alone shouldn't cause the issue. The 403 should help and after a couple days return to as was. you can also submit a DMCA request - http://www.dmca.com/FAQ/What-is-a-DMCA-Takedown to help. Rings a bell to some hijacking I've read about which ties in with the domain privacy settings for that domain.
Also like Kevin said you can use Google - https://support.google.com/legal/answer/3110420?hl=en-GB
Let me know in a few days if it returns to normal which it should.
-
Report this to Google thru the Feedback section of your webmaster tools. Google "should" discredit the thief and return your status. Be prepared to verify the content is your original work.
Good Luck,
KJr
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
-
What is the best strategy to SEO Discontinued Products on Ecommerce Sites?
RebelsMarket.com is a marketplace for alternative fashion. We have hundreds of sellers who have listed thousands of products. Over 90% of the items do not generate any sales; and about 40% of the products have been on the website for over 3+ years. We want to cleanup the catalog and remove all the old listings that older than 2years that do not generate any sales. What is the best practice for removing thousands of listings an Ecommerce site? do we 404 these products and show similar items? Your help and thoughts is much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JimJ3 -
Opinion on Gotch SEO methods & services
I would love to get you all's take on Gotch SEO. I am gearing up to link build for a site in the next several months, and have been reading up from sources other than Moz, in preparation. (Need to re-read Moz's guide, too, but I have already read it last year) I'm reading Gotch SEO's main link building method articles right now, and am wondering what you all think. Do you think they have a good approach and are generally reliable? Likewise, has anyone used their service for getting a link? What was your experience? Or if you haven't used the service, any quick takes on it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | scienceisrad0 -
Website penalized never again be the same
In February 2015 I received google email that had been penalized Superficial content with little or no added value. I resolved the situation with Google and the site was reconsidered two months later. The problem happens that since I had to drop the site never again be the same, since the site has been penalized never again be the same, now owned only 10% of visits and since then has not shown more growth. I'm deciding to leave the site for no more hopes and all who have had the same problem told me to forget about and working with new. What do you think? Give up the site and get a new one? In addition, during this period I rephrased the entire site, let responsive, mobile and improved as a whole in the general context and migrated to wordpress. www.acervoamador.com.br (Warning: adult content) I thank you for your attention and have a nice day.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | stroke0 -
Ranking without SEO?
We have a client that we've been doing white-hat SEO for for over 3 years and they've always been number 1 in Google for all their targeted keywords. This year, their competition has been ranking above them and our client has been pushed towards the bottom of the first page. After thorough research, we discovered that this competitor is doing no SEO at all, just regular PR which our client is also doing. Our client is even spending money in Adwords and their competition isn't. Can anyone explain how a website that does zero SEO can magically be ranked at the top now and above our competitor who we're doing everything possible for?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOhughesm0 -
Got dropped on Google rank - Tips to discover why please
Hi guys originally my website was poor ranked on Google. So, after sign in on Moz and follow their tips I achieved the 4th position for one of my keywords (amazing!). But a few days ago my page dropped to bellow the first 50th pages for this same keyword, but I didn't make any changes on it. Anybody has some tips of how can I discover/repair what happened? Thank you all in advance. Best regards Paulo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | phlcastro0 -
Do sitewide links from other sites hurt SEO?
A friend of mine has a pagerank 3 website that links to all my pages on my site on every page of his site. The anchor text of all these links are the title of each page that it links to. Does this hurt SEO? I can have him change to the links to whatever i want, so if it does hurt, what should i change the anchor text to if needed? Thanks mozzers! Ron
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ron100 -
What's the best way to set up 301's from an old off-site subdomain to a new off-site subdomain?
We are moving our Online store to a new service and we need to create 301's for all of the old product URLs. Being that the old store was hosted off-site, what is the best way to handle the 301 re-directs? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VermilionDesignInteractive0 -
Methods for getting links to my site indexed?
What are the best practices for getting links to my site indexed in search engines. We have been creating content and acquiring backlinks for the last few months. They are not being found in the back link checkers or in the Open Site Explorer. What are the tricks of the trade for imporiving the time and indexing of these links? I have read about some RSS methods using wordpress sites but that seems a little shady and i am sure google is looking for that now. Look forward to your advice.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | devonkrusich0