Someone pointed their website to my servers

copyright violation

[mohitj1]

Day before yesterday I found out on copyscape.com that there is a 100% copy of my website online. I found out after careful analysis that someone pointed their website to my ip address using forwarding via masking which caused duplicate content issue.

My website was # 1 on Google for several keywords. I was thinking my ranking dropped to # 5 because of fluctuation due to penguin 3.0 but the main cause was duplicate content.

ACTION I TOOK: I filed a dmca complained with my hosting provider and Google. As a result hosting provider took action by bringing the website offline. On the other hand I asked my developer to redirect my website from the copied url to a 404 page.

The problem I am facing now is that my ranking dropped to #11 today. Wondering why did this happen even though the duplicate content issue is resolved.

Another doubt I have is how will Google check if duplicate content exists online because the website how was pointing to my website is offline now.

I am frustrated. It feels bad to drop to #10 after being on # 1 on Google for so long.

Can someone help ?

[not2easy]

Welcome to the forums mohitj1. Yours is an interesting question, but raises other questions.
The other URL is gone, why would you try to redirect another domain's traffic to a 404 page? You cannot control or redirect URL requests that are not on your domain or other people would be using that to kill their competition. If that were possible, everyone would just redirect all traffic to Amazon to land on their own site.
I would ask your developer to remove whatever they added to try to redirect another domain's traffic, because it may be hurting your own.

[lucy24]

someone pointed their website to my ip address using forwarding via masking which caused duplicate content issue

This is a little obscure. When someone requests the other site, do they get redirected to your site, or does the site simply display the content of your site at their own URL? The part about your host suggests that the offending site did some DNS hanky-panky which your host nipped in the bud by no longer recognizing their name.

People can't point their own domain name to someone else's IP ... unless you let them by not having a domain-name-canonicalization redirect. (Normally this is just for with/without www and the like, but it will also cover requests for the flat-out wrong name.)

not2easy, what does a person gain by serving someone else's content on their own domain name? Is it just one stage in some longer scheme?

[not2easy]

@ lucy24 -Some people just scrape the content and host it because they are lazy or not very bright or because they can, others do it for assorted if misguided benefit, whether for phishing, marketing or "SEO". Some use an iFrame to do the same thing. I can't guess what the motivation was in this case.
The host may simply have forwarded the DMCA to the offending host where it should have been filed or it could be as you said, the host prevents their access.

[mohitj1]

The other site was displaying my content because they forwarded their domain to mine. I did some digging and actually the other site took the site offline because I threatened him to file a lawsuit but since I was too worried about my rankings I had already filed dmca complaint with Google. Since his site was pointing to my dns which was showing my site as a true mirror copy I asked my developer to fix this on web.config so it shows 404 error. Now the other site is offline probably because the site owner must have taken it down. My hosting provider replied that they can't find the content and they see the site offline so they can't do anything. I am now concerned if Google figures out that duplicate content is not online at all. I am sure Google can check cached results because copyscape is still showing the url of that site but when I click on the url on copyscape, it shows 500 server error.

[mohitj1]

I have never done seo. I have always believed in creating quality content that is the reason why since Jan 2013 my site has been on # 1 on serps for 3 key phrases. Today it shows #10 in U.S but it shows # 1 in data center at India. I am worried. Wonder what is going on.

[lucy24]

If the offending site's DNS was pointing to your server, and your host has slammed the door so they're no longer able to do so, then their site is de facto gone because there's, well, no other place for them to be. At least until they find somewhere else to point their DNS ... and search engines are bound to notice if you're pointing to a different server every other week. (Er ... they do keep track of this kind of thing, right?)

There are two parts to this kind of hijacking. One part is telling the DNS folks that such-and-such domain (plain-English name) lives on such-and-such server (numerical IP address). The other part is that the server has to accept requests for this domain name. If you said to your host "Oi! This isn't my domain and I don't want them around!" and they immediately pulled the plug, that's good.

Slammed the door, pulled the plug, take arms against a sea of troubles. Whatever.

[mohitj1]

Thanks for your response. I felt the same way but wonder why rankings dropped to # 10. Other data centers are showing # 1. My ranking was stable on # 1 through all panda & penguin update even during penguin 3.0.

Will let you'll know if rankings bounce back. Hopefully Google is able to check dns status like you mentioned if they don't find our content on offending site because it is offline. Thanks so much !

[Taryn_S]

From lucy24:

People can't point their own domain name to someone else's IP ... unless you let them by not having a domain-name-canonicalization redirect. (Normally this is just for with/without www and the like, but it will also cover requests for the flat-out wrong name.)

So if I have a redirect like:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.example\.com)?$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

is this considered to be a "domain-name-canonicalization" redirect? Does this type of redirect prevent "requests for the flat-out wrong name"?

[lucy24]

Does this type of redirect prevent "requests for the flat-out wrong name"?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Yes, that's the beauty of expressing the condition as a negative. So even if you have a lousy host who doesn't respond to "Hey! Get them off my site!" requests, you are still protected.

[mohitj1]

So this what you suggest even I should do next time when someone tries to point to my site ?

Also it is quite interesting that Googlebot couldn't crawl on my site because googlebot was showing 5xx server error even though robots were not blocking anything:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

I asked my developer to remove robots.txt completely. One thing after another, first the copyright infringement issue and now this. Webmaster tool is showing "0" pages indexed. I am just waiting for Google to crawl again since robots.txt was removed. Hopefully rankings go back to # 1 again.

Please suggest what I should do.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, mohitj1!

So this what you suggest even I should do next time when someone tries to point to my site ?

you should always have a general hostname canonicalization redirect in place.

Also it is quite interesting that Googlebot couldn't crawl on my site because googlebot was showing 5xx server error even though robots were not blocking anything:

the 500 error is irrelevant to robots exclusion.
check your web server error log for clues when you see a 500 status code.

Please suggest what I should do.

try "fetch as googlebot" in GWT and see if your server is prodiding expected responses.

[aakk9999]

Are they hosted by the same hoster? It could have been hosting mistake.

Happened to one of my clients, but the other way around - during the server move somehow my client's site for a very short time pointed to webspace of another site that was on the same server. It was corrected within an hour or so, but not quickly enough for google not to come and index all URLs from the other site, but the hostname being my client's site.

All these URLs now return 404 and are slowly dropping out from Google's index. Do not know what damage (if any) this caused to this other site.

[mohitj1]

I have done everything I could. There is no duplicate copy of the website. The only reason why rankings could fall is because I moved the site 3 weeks back to https:// but I did all necessary 301 redirects. Let me know if anyone can help. This site was # 1 on Google for over 1.5 years for 10 key phrases. Webmaster tool shows Google indexed all pages on site version without https but https version shows 0 indexed but Googlebot crawls everyday. Let me know your views.

[edited by: not2easy at 4:59 am (utc) on Nov 9, 2014]
[edit reason] No URLs please [/edit]

[not2easy]

Sorry, needed to edit your request for a site review. We do not do site reviews on the public side of this forum, but you can ask for a site review in the private, paid section.

We try to help you based the information you have shared about your site and what you describe is typical for a site that has moved to https:, but has not added the the new https: URLs to your GWT account to let Google know about the changes. They view [example.com...] as a different site from http://www.example.com until you give them that information. The 500 errors are like Google is looking for your domain without https: and that a proper 301 redirect to https: has not been put in place. Read the suggestions from Google here: [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...] and expect that there will be a period of changes in the search results until it evens out again. changes don't happen overnight.

[phranque]

have you added the HTTPS: site to your Google Webmaster Tools account?

[mohitj1]

Yes I have added https url on Google webmaster. I have also taken care of canonical url.

[mohitj1]

also 301 redirect of the url from http to https.

[not2easy]

If you type in a page URL from your site using http: instead of https: does it take you to https: and return a 301 response in the headers?
To see the server response, you can use Firefox browser with the Live HTTP Headers extension added.
IF you are not getting a 301 redirect, you can get help for that in the Apache forum: [webmasterworld.com...] - if your site is hosted using an Apache server.
IF you are seeing 301 server response it is a matter of trying "Fetch as Google" in your GWT account to check for their errors, or wait and see if they can fetch OK.

[mohitj1]

I have another question. Someone told me to place even the old site map under different file name on root directory and also submit to Google because 301 redirect is coming from http:// version.

Rankings are still stuck at #10. I am trying to manually change the url from http to https on the links created in the past.

[lucy24]

Don't waste time stressing about the sitemap. A site map's only purpose is to help search engines find your content if it's all concealed behind obscure javascript links or login pages.

-- If everything is accessible via ordinary plain-text links, you don't need a sitemap at all. Doubly so if you allow search engines to crawl your scripts anyway.

-- If something requires a login, think twice about whether you want it indexed at all. Most humans who do a search and end up on a login page will not race to sign up; they'll simply leave in disgust.

As a matter of fact: if you don't have weird links or restricted pages, a sitemap could potentially even be harmful. Not in SEO but in real life. The search engine sees the sitemap, learns your URLs, and crawls them all. So you don't notice that some of those URLs are not actually visible to ordinary humans following visible links-- or, at a minimum, they're not accessible by following the links a human would think to try.

[not2easy]

If all your URLs are 301 redirected to https: URLs, you should not still have the old URLs in a sitemap on your site. In your GWT account you should have both sites. You can go to the old one and delete that sitemap so they will stop looking for the old URLs. Before you do that, make sure that if you type in an old URL or paste it into your browser that it takes you to https: with the same URL. You need a new sitemap with the new https: URLs and submit that sitemap to the new site in GWT.

If you need help with the 301s can get help with that in the Apache Forum here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[mohitj1]

Thanks so much for your response. Yes all urls are 301 redirected and I have sitemap that is automatically updated through xml-sitemaps.com. New sitemap is also submitted thru GWT. I have both sites ( http & https) versions on GWT. The problem is I have 285 pages on the site and GWT is showing only half indexed. Also when I type my url on Google after site: I see 785 results, wonder where additional 500 results come from. Also I noticed that when I paste first 2 lines from the first paragraph of my site I see 361 sites like m.biz have copied this phrase.

[edited by: not2easy at 2:42 am (utc) on Nov 13, 2014]
[edit reason] Compliance with TOS [/edit]

[mohitj1]

The site that had copied my content is now offline but webmaster tool and copyscape.com is still showing that duplicate content exists on that website.

[mohitj1]

I need help resolving this issue. Do you'll have anyone experienced who can look at these issues ?

[mohitj1]

Most of the issues are resolved. I see my website shows on #1 then it falls again to #10. This has been happening for last 2 days. This is a good indication.

There is one issue that lingers. On webmaster tool I have http, www and https version ( 3 versions) of the site but the live site is https so when I type site: and the url of the site it shows 995 results while I have only 271 pages on the live site. Webmaster tool shows 271 pages crawled on http version and shows crawled 471 pages on https version. Does this mean that I should delete all versions on webmaster tool except https version ?

[not2easy]

Don't just delete them in GWT, Google has a link to let them know that the sites "http://example.com" and "http://www.example.com" are now at [example.com...] and you should see that link when you log in to GWT and look at the list of sites. Look for a link on the right side of the list (one for each site) where you can manage your sites.

[mohitj1]

It does show with links the way you explained but wonder why Google is showing 3 times the results.

[not2easy]

Why 3 times? Because they consider the three listed as three different sites until you tell them what you want. The 301 redirects take them from the non https to the https, but you still list the sites in GWT.

My suggestion to use GWT for the old versions to delete the sitemaps for

http:

and

http://www.

was because it is the fastest way I have seen for them to really stop trying to crawl old URLs. You can do that first or go straight to managing the versions, but you should have used the "Manage" links to notify them about the changes when the changes were made so they could know what you want.

[edited by: not2easy at 7:55 pm (utc) on Dec 2, 2014]

[lucy24]

On webmaster tool I have http, www and https version ( 3 versions)

Shouldn't it be four? http and https both ways, with-and-without www both ways.

You need all forms in WMT just so you can tell them which of the four you prefer.