Site with Similar domain name has stolen our content

[leftylee]

I'm a non-technical volunteer committee chairperson who's responsible for my church's website. We used a domain name in the past that we didn't renew and someone else now owns it. If you google our church name, this URL comes up way before our legitimate site AND it displays our content from several years ago.

The contact info appears to be bogus (contact is listed at Main Street in London) and I've had no response to emails. I emailed the hosting company about the problem, and they told me to send a DMCA form and that the offending company had 48 hours to respond. That was several weeks ago, and now they are no longer responding to my emails requesting status.

One problem is that I cannot document that the content is ours. But the offending site uses our name, address and phone number and includes photos of our members.

It's causing problems because people - even our own members - end up there instead of the real site.

We're a church! Who rips off a church? I can't figure out what they have to gain from it.

After the DCMA forms, is an attorney the next step?

[buckworks]

I'll let someone else comment on the stolen content issues, but one thing you could do that would help the real site to rank better would be to research what sites are linking to the expired domain, and ask them to update their links.

Go to Yahoo and use the linkdomain: command in the search box to find other sites that are linking to the old site:

linkdomain:TheOldDomain.com

[erdsah88]

hmmmmmm.

the only thing u should worry is buld a better site.

PS:U can prove that that is your content!
Use "waybackback machine" search on google.it stores all the webpages ever been published...