Watch Out for Duplicates of Your Site! just found an exact duplicate of our site on another domain

[samwest]

I see a lost of reports of traffic dropping. I am also seeing this but today we discovered a rouge domain hosting what looks like and exact copy of our site. The internal links and point back to our domain, but it's hosted on a completely different, privately registered domain.

So, watch your logs and if you use wordpress and wordfence, you'll be able to ferret out the culprit. But, what do you do to remove that site?
Probably hosted in Indonesia.

Will the black hatters ever tire or their games?

[samwest]

nslookup for abdc.com and wxyz.com are identical...looking to tech support to find a solution to stop serving anything for wxyz.com

[not2easy]

Are they framing your site? You mention it is wordpress and they would need to be using your site's database if they are not simply framing it. Do you use a no-frames script?

[rish3]

I've noticed this, and the new generation sites like this aren't using an iframe. They are using javascript/ajax to output the content. Google's improved ability to understand javascript means it get indexed as if the content were really there.

Will be frustrating, though, if a DMCA takedown is denied because "the content isn't there" :)

[samwest]

As a quick fix, I simply added a .htaccess redirect to the good site.
Now if you type abcd.com, you don't get wxyz.com in the address bar, you get abcd.com, as it should be.

If anyone sees any holes in this approach, please advise.

I'm not sure if we are an isolated incident. It was by shear luck (and wordfence) that this issue was discovered. I wonder how many others might be loosing traffic due to this type of problem.

I am wondering if Google would considers this content duplication as it is across two different domains and whack both with a demerit?

Either way, our traffic has been steadily declining.

More negative seo tactics I guess. It never ends.

[bwnbwn]

samwest is it just the home page duplicated?

[Planet13]

QUESTION:

As a quick fix, I simply added a .htaccess redirect to the good site.

How exactly did you do the redirect?

could you post the (exemplified) code here?

[samwest]

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^wxyz.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.wxyz.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.abcd.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[Planet13]

I must be missing something, and I apologize in advance for my ignorance.

just so I understand:

A scraper has copied your content (which is on abc.com) and they are hosting it on wxyz.com.

You put the .htaccess rewrite on YOUR abc.com domain, right?

So how would that affect people who visit wxyz.com site? (The site that scraped your content). Shouldn't the people who come to YOUR domain be experiencing the rewrite?

Again, I apologize if I misunderstand this.

[johnhh]

@Planet13 I think the OP means what he said

nslookup for abdc.com and wxyz.com are identical

so the rogue site is being pointed at the example.com, the 'real site'

I hope I am understanding correctly...

But the whole htaccess needs to be checked as well in case it has been hacked.

We had this a few years ago, a p*rn domain name pointing to our IP and nameservers, then they hacked our htaccess to divert it to another p*rn site. Luckily they didn't write the redirects correctly :) We changed IP's as well.

[samwest]

Johnhh is correct. They both point to the same IP...why they are doing this I do not know, I can only assume it is for nefarious reasons.

It had to be this way for quite some time because Google has their site listed as OUR site! A that's where I see a problem.

As I mentioned, a search on google for wxyz.com shows abcd.com as the first listing. weird. wish I knew more...just want others to be aware since my traffic is dropping the same as all the recent reports. Thought maybe this might be one reason. Only God knows how G will treat it.

[martinibuster]

Are you on a shared server?

It's possible that other site is an old site that used to have the same IP. They may have taken the site offline but never updated their DNS information. Then you came along and were assigned their old IP.
Something similar happened to me many years ago.

To confirm this scenario, it's possible to view the old site, if it existed, by checking it out at Archive.org. If it appears to be simply a case of someone taking a site offline then contact them through the info listed in the whois or via Archive.org.

[aakk9999]

Are you on a shared server?

It's possible that other site is an old site that used to have the same IP.

Excellent point. I have seen this before.

In this case the other domain would be pointing in the same webspace on the server so what samwest did in .htaccess percectly makes sense.

In fact, unless abcd site uses subdomains, it is better to say "if not www.abcd.com then redirect to www.abcd.com"

This way it also caters for www/non-www redirection as well as any other domains that may end up pointing to the same IP.

[drkblog]

Registering a domain and pointing DNS to another server is usually not enough for duplicating a site. That would work if your website is over a dedicated server and IP address, and the server is configured for serving you website for any value of the "Host" HTTP request field. Check field description here: [en.wikipedia.org...]

Usually an ISP is going to server multiple websites over a single IP address. Which means you have multiple domains resolving to the same IP. The webserver delivers the proper website based on the value of the HOST field sent by your browser as part of the request data.

A webserver hosting a single site is likely to be configured to server the site without checking the host field value. A server with multiple sites could be configured for serving one of its websites without checking this value. But this would be uncommon.

[Bluejeans]

Same here. Just discovered it last week. 80 pages from my site were scraped. I tracked down the hosting company, filed a DMCA and it was taken down within hours. I don't believe it was inadvertent as the contact info on whois was apparently bogus and a check of archive.org revealed no information on the site. Now a google search of wxyz.com reveals 80 page titles and descriptions from my site that return a 404. What a mess. I don't understand the scam. My content was not in an iframe and no other code was changed.

[martinibuster]

That would work if your website is over a dedicated server and IP address...

I'm fairly certain it works with just a dedicated IP address.