Scammer hurting my reputation or search engine listings?

Scammer site listing my sites as sponsors, sponsor pages eventually redirec

[Katt]

I don't know where to turn but this concerns me:

I got a Google alert about this site, checked it out and see they claim to give away "free designs" (fairly common in my industry). They also claim these "free designs" are sponsored by my industry's most recognizable companies, including mine! I'm NOT sponsoring anything like this, so I click on my company's name, I'm taken to a page with a thumbnail of the design, that says "This design is sponsored by Company XYZ - Click for more information". I click and get a page showing a larger view of the design, with links to download it in various formats. (I downloaded one but haven't opened it yet). Then at the bottom of the page it says "You will be redirected to the sponsor's site it 20 seconds." and sure enough, I get redirected to my site.

I plan to write a cease and desist letter to the registered owner of the domain, but since they are far outside the US I want to do more. Should I report this to the major search engines? Is there anything else I can do to protect my company's reputation and search engine rankings from unscrupulous sites such as this one? Thank you for any and all suggestions.

[Quadrille]

Send the URL to the other companies; one of them may have contacts in that country.

Failing that, a class action means costs shared.

Also contact your country's department of trade - depending which country the scammers are in, some are being leaned on to control their scammers. Others don't care!

[Katt]

Thank you! I will email all of the other "sponsor" companies about this.

Can you tell me if I have anything to worry about with the search engines? I know the "you can't control who links to you" line of thinking, but do the search engines really think this way? And what about the redirect? Would it help or hurt if I blocked referring from this site? I'm thinking that blocking the referrals might send a clear message to the search engines that I do not approve of what they're doing.

Thank you again!

[caveman]

Is your concern based on duplicate content, or links to you?

[Jhet]

You could put a message on your homepage letting the people who are redirected know that you are in no way affiliated with the other website.

[Katt]

My concern is the redirect and how this may appear to the search engines. I just looked at the code on the page and the redirect is done with javascript - will search engines ignore this or will they follow the redirect? Will this look like I'm using spammy doorway pages? I know there are "tricks" involving redirects that can get you dropped from search engines but I don't know enough about how it works or how the search engines determine what is a good redirect and what is a bad redirect. Maybe I'm worrying over nothing but I don't know?

[Quadrille]

I don't see that this will either help or harm your site, in SEO terms. If they link to a particular page, you could replace that page with a "welcome this is the real thing" page.

[caveman]

Agree with Quadrille. It's not very likely that it will hurt your SE rankings.

Also, if you can convince their hosting company that they've lifted your content w/o permission, you may be able to get the host to shut them down. May be a stretch, but if they've grabbed enough of your content, and depending upon exactly how they're using it, it's a possibility.

DMCA's are another route but again, it depends on just how it's used, and you don't want to file false claims.

I sorta think it's something you should first contact the site about and perhaps if that doesn't work, their hosting company, and failing that, just monitor the situation. Chances are it won't create problems anyway.

[Katt]

Thank you all for your help. I feel better, although I do plan to take steps to try to have this stuff removed from the offending site. I won't lose any sleep over the search engines though.

Thank you again!