Forum Moderators: not2easy
Last night one of my customers emailed me a URL...it wasn't his URL, but when I went to it, it's his site. Another company in China has pointed their DNS servers at his domain name. First, isn't that illegal? Second, our hosting company said sorry, we can't do anything. Third - why? Since they're in China I have a hard time believing there's anything we can do about it, but why would they do that? are they stealing our search engine rankings?
thoughts? can I do anything?
carrie
You could add a javascript to check if the site was called under the correct domain and if not, redirect it.
I am not sure, how to point a DNS to a domain name. Maybe it's a proxy mirror of your site? In any case, the above should help.
Doing it via JavaScript may trigger a cloaking penalty.
carrie
I had the same thing happen a few months ago when I moved to a new server. Someone else had two domains still pointing to one of the IP addresses that was new to me but had been his in a previous contract. The content for one of our sites was showing up under those domains as well as for the real domain.
We spotted the problem because of some odd referrers in our analytics, and we solved it by phoning the owner of the "rogue" domains, getting him to look at what was happening, and asking him to update his DNS. He did so very quickly after he understood the problem.
If you can track down a contact for the problem domains, make a polite request that they update their DNS. You might or might not get cooperation, especially if language is a barrier, but it's certainly worth a try.
