Dealing with someone that has their DNS set to my IP

Can htaccess solve my problem?

[davenaff]

Someone that manages their own DNS has set it so that another domain maps to my IP address.

My site is new, this site is established. Unfortunately, they are ranking above me in a number of google searches using my content.

How do I prevent visitors to their site from seeing my content?

Thanks!

[surrealillusions]

I would of thought that this is a form of stealing.

Although i haven't heard of anyone 'mapping' a sites ip address to copy the content.
Perhaps someone could explain that to me?

As for preventing visitors seeing your content on their site, i dont think its possible. Maybe if someone can explain the mapping i could work out what was happening?

You could report them to google for duplicate/stealing content from yourselves. Thats all i can suggest at the moment.

:)

[Achernar]

Do you mean that you see your site displayed with their hostname in the url bar? Are you sure that their domains points to your site, and that they didn't simply copied your pages on their server?

It means that your server accept queries regardless of the hostname. You should set it up to serve your content from a virtual host, and set an empty directory as the home for the default site.

[davenaff]

Yeah, when I do an nslookup for their domain, it shows my IP address (it is not a shared IP). Their nameserver is their own.

So, my site is displayed with their hostname in the URL bar.

Achernar, can you provide any pointers for setting up the site to serve as a virtual host?

Is there any other way to prevent this?

[Philosopher]

I would ask this question in the appropriate Server software forum (either apache or IIS whatever your server is) as you will get a better answer.

There should be a fairly easy way to stop it, but I don't know it off hand.

Also, I'm unsure why they would do this. It's still your content they are showing so it would be your ads/product/etc. they are showing as well....what's in it for them?

[LifeinAsia]

Assuming the DNS entry was intentional, it sounds like the other site is getting high rankings from your site to boost its rankings. At some later time, they will probably change the DNS to their own site.

If this was happening to me, I would do a 301 redirect from othersite.com to myseite.com.

[davenaff]

Ah, good idea. 301 redirect it is. Thanks.

[jake66]

I had somebody do this to me a few years ago, but it turned out they were on the same server and it was "accidental" on the host's part..

If this was happening to me, I would do a 301 redirect from othersite.com to myseite.com.

301 via htaccess or is this something that has to go in the server rules?

[phranque]

.htaccess is essentially a way to implement server rules on a per-directory basis so this could go in the document root directory .htaccess.

[lammert]

There is even a better option than blocking with .htaccess, and that is to benefit from the link power of the domain linking to you. You have to convert all INTERNAL relative links in your site to absolute links to your domain though, so there is some work to do. The easiest way to do this is with a BASE tag in the header of your HTML which causes all relative URLs in the HTML code to be translated as absolute URLs to the domain you defined in the BASE tag.

This works as follows. Assume that your domain name is good.com and their domain name is evil.com. Everyone visiting pages from evil.com will only see absolute links to pages on your domain good.com. Visitors to evil.com will therefore as soon as they click on an internal link be transferred to good.com. Pagerank assigned to evil.com pages will be distributed to your good.com pages via these internal links.

[jtara]

A 301 to < something distasteful > would be nice...

[edited by: tedster at 5:38 am (utc) on Mar. 16, 2008]

[ShorehamPC]

Have you tried setting up 2 virtual servers? The first (default) virtual server could point to a directory with nothing more than "Welcome to my Server". This would trap any host name that does not match the 2nd virtual server. Then set the 2nd virtual server to point to your real site's directory.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], ShorehamPC!