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Spammer's Domain Indexed with My Site's Content

ivorobey

10:14 pm on Mar 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Hello,
I was wondering if someone has been in this situation and can share their input.

A week ago in the google webmaster tools I have noticed that one of my site has 1.1 million links to it.
It turns out that someone has configured A records, for their server, to disguise their ip as my site's ip, and when you visit their site, you actually see my site under their domain.

Example:
When you visit NS2.RandomSpamDomain.com you actually see my website under their domain, and google has indexed all of NS2.RandomSpamDomain.com and in my webmaster tools listed each URL as a link to my site.

At that time, my hosting company has edited the bindings of my site so that it only listens for connections to my domain and not the other domain, however they were only able to do this for HTTP and not HTTPS, so when you visit HTTPS ://NS2.RandomSpamDomain.com you can still see the content of my site under their domain, while HTTP: //NS2.RandomSpamDomain.com is not showing anything now.

The hosting company for the spamming domain has pawned this complaint under the copyright complaint and would not do anything. IC3 have not replied a week after the complaint has been filed.

So my questions are:
- What where the spamers trying to achieve? (phishing maybe)
- Would 1.1 million links to my site (versus average 100 links per site) hurt the SEO ranking?
- If so how do I report it to google without requesting them to remove URL one by one in the external url removal tool?
- If no one is going to do anything about their site, what else should I do about it?

All the input is greatly appreciated!

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:51 pm (utc) on Mar 11, 2012]
[edit reason] fixed formatting [/edit]

aok88

1:46 pm on Mar 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I just had this happen to a site of mine. On a free hosting service, a spammer took my entire site and replaced images and links with their spam. But the site's layout stayed the exact same! They didn't change anything else, but forgot to change the hot link in the logo image (which of course linked to my homepage), so there were tons of spam links coming in.

I contacted the host and they removed it immediately. They must get that a lot.

I would consider tracking them down via whois.com. Or see if the host can at least give up the name of the site owner.

Or if it's private, then you may need a lawyer to send the host a letter.

ivorobey

3:24 pm on Mar 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Thank you for the info. almost 2 weeks after I contacted their hosting company, there is still nothing done about spammers domain pointing to my server. I guess you just have to get lucky.

herculano

4:58 pm on Mar 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I wonder if there's a way to auto 301 redirect to your main domain if it's not your main domain.. in php it's the $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] will return your domain name.

ivorobey

6:18 pm on Mar 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I wonder if there's a way to auto 301 redirect to your main domain if it's not your main domain.. in php it's the $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] will return your domain name.

we were thinking of doing it in web.cofig, but do you think its safe for seo purposes?

rlange

9:17 pm on Mar 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

ivorobey wrote:
- What where the spamers trying to achieve? (phishing maybe)

Seems like this might be a more efficient method of building up a reputation with search engines. At some point they'll probably switch their A records to point to their own malicious or spammy content.

ivorobey wrote:
we were thinking of doing it in web.cofig, but do you think its safe for seo purposes?

I can't see it being a problem, but I'd wait for others' comments.

Something else that might work, if possible, is to add a canonical link in the <head> section of each page explicitly pointing to your own domain, like so:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html">

--
Ryan

ivorobey

6:31 pm on Mar 28, 2012 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Thanks for the help. We have created a 301 Redirect in the web.config file and 30 days later all the links from spammers domain are gone in our webmaster tools