Site Duplicated & Hijacked - Did I beat them at their own game?

[McMohan]

Here is the case -

1. One of my sites duplicated, rather mirrored. It is done by a pro spammer, who has hacked into thousands of sites and given himself the links.

2. Google, as it is known to bungle, did stumble and considered my site as the duplicate and replaced this site's ranks with the spammer's URL. An info:mysite.com search in Google shows spammerssite.com

3. With the ranks hijacked, I wrote to the spam webmaster without hoping for a reply and no reply came by.

4. Then a thought stuck me as a possible short cut. The site was mirrored code for code, Google WMT verification code included.

5. I verified the spammer's website in my WMT account and it got verified!

6. Next I used the URL removal tool to remove spammer's website from Google.

This is where I am at present. It is a grand show of spamming excellence. I know in the same way I verified his URL, he too can, so I have to stop him from mirroring content, which I believe is the next step in the sequence?

Regards

[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:04 pm (utc) on Sep 13, 2014]
[edit reason] Forum Charter [/edit]

[seoskunk]

Funny you got site removed but you do need to stop the mirroring of content. I bet its done with curl and banning his ip from your server might do the trick.

If the spammer is using some kind of proxy then you could reverse / forward googlebot.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en [support.google.com]

[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:06 pm (utc) on Sep 13, 2014]
[edit reason] Forum Charter [/edit]

[McMohan]

seoskunk, thanks for the inputs. - I have managed to stop them from mirroring the site. Thanks to invaluable post by phranque over at [webmasterworld.com ]

The spam site is gone from results, but my site is yet to get its due. Must be awhile G recognizes it as the original site and restore the ranks?

[not2easy]

Did you go back to GWT and re-verify your own site? Since their site verified as yours, removing their URL may have sent a signal to remove your own with the same verification code. You can request a new verification code and replace the old one, which might be needed.

The URL removal tool works immediately, but after 30 or 60 days (sorry, I forget the exact number) they will try to crawl that URL again. You can report their domain before the next time Google might crawl it and keep it from coming back.

[McMohan]

not2easy, I didn't have to re-verify my own site, since the status shows as it being verified with all the relevant data. Unless of course I have to delete this verified site and re-verify again?

Until yesterday, Google showed no data for info:mysite.com search, but today it shows proper details. No ranks yet though, but I think Google has to adjust its index to re-rank mysite.com?

You can report their domain before the next time Google might crawl it and keep it from coming back.

After I added the code to .htaccess to block mirroring, the spam site doesn't carry my site content, so I reckon even after 60 days when Google tries to recrawl spam site, it may not restore ranks?

Thanks!

[aakk9999]

I think you do not need to re-verify your site unless you are worried that Google had made an association between your site and the spam site that you previously added and that this association would adversely affect you.

If you were to re-verify it, you will need a different WMT account since I aseem to remember that the verification code from one WMT account is always the same.

With regards to getting your site back to SERPs, is it in SERPs, but just not ranking or is it not in SERPs at all? If it got filtered out, you may try Fetch as Googlebot of your home page and then resubmitting URL and all linked URLs to index.

After I added the code to .htaccess to block mirroring, the spam site doesn't carry my site content, so I reckon even after 60 days when Google tries to recrawl spam site, it may not restore ranks?

Correct.

Since your site was mirrored (rather than scraped) and hence their site does not show your content, you do not need to worry about Google restoring their rankings based on your content (unless they decide to scrape your content and reinstate it rather than mirror it).

[McMohan]

aakk9999, thanks for the suggestions. I will wait for about 2-3 weeks to see if the ranks will improve, else will re-verify just in case if that were the issue.

It ranks for domain name in 80s for an internal page (It was where it ranked even while site was hijacked). No other ranks for anything substantial. All the pages indexed. Soon after I tanked the spammer site through URL removal tool, I got my site fetched and added to index.

unless they decide to scrape your content and reinstate it rather than mirror it

Yes, that is a worry. Not sure how to avoid that, unless Google spam report will be of any help in practice?