Someone copied my site

what can I do?

[bikeshop]

I sell discount bike tours and adventure tours in the Caribbean. While doing a search on Overture today using the term "cheap trips to the Dominican Republic" I came across a site that had the identical meta title & description of my site. When I clicked on to this site, I realized it was my site. This person changed the name of the site, the copyright info and removed my newsletter opt in form and all my contact info.

We use the abbreviation CBT (Caribbean Bike Tours) These people registered the site as CCBBTT.net Do I have any recourse? Can you suggest anything to do to prevent these people from doing more damage? I tried contacting them through the info I found in whois but to no avail. They haven't answered my emails and their phone # is disconnected.

This is the info I have about them. Is there anything in this info that can help me. I read these forums often but never saw this problem discussed.

Thanks very much.

Offending Site Info

Domain Name: CCBBTT.NET

Registered Through: CheapDomainGroup Created on 6/02/2003 22:35:01

Expires on 6/02/2004 06:23:13 Record last updated on: 6/02/2003

Owner, Administrative Contact, Technical Contact,

Billing Contact: GUANG TANG (ID00020249)

805, Hedrick Dr. Montpelier, VT 05604 us

Phone: [phone] (disconnected number)

Email: [e-mail] (no response)

Domain servers in listed order: NS1.YRHOST.NET NS2.YRHOST.NET

[Mardi_Gras]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, bikeshop, although I am sorry it is this kind of problem that prompted you to post. I would point out to you that the type of identfiying information you've posted violates the TOS here, so please consider deleting it.

I would try to contact the site host - that may offer your best opportunity to stop them, although often there is little that can be done.

Do check and make certain they are not hot-linking to your images and stealing your bandwidth. If they are, you can extract a little creative revenge on them by swapping out the images...

Others here may have a more optimistic view on your options...

<<added>>If you do a site search here for "site copied" you will find lots of comments on similar problems...<</added>>

[edited by: Mardi_Gras at 2:44 am (utc) on June 13, 2003]

[Jenstar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

We have had this discussion several times recently. You will find the information you need to send a cease and desist to get the infringer to remove the copied content, as well as other steps you can take:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

Good luck!

[Skylo]

We have for the last 6 months had to watch a sit climb the serps beating us now. We have faith in google though. We had threatened them with lawyers but unfortunately they are based in nigeria and we are way down south!

So we let google take it's course and now after all this movement by dominic they are no longer there. They still list but it is a redirect to their hosting company saying the page is temporarily unavailable!

Yay:-)