my site has been cloned. Any suggestion on what to do?

[francesckosky]

Hi.

Today, with my big surprise, I have discovered a site that is a clone of my site <snip>
Here is the clone site I discovered: <snip>
As you can see, it's exactly the same

How is that possible? What do you suggest to do?

Thanks in advance for any clarification it will be provided.
Regards

[edited by: engine at 11:06 am (utc) on May 20, 2021]

[JorgeV]

Hello,

How is that possible?

The same was a web browser downloads pages of your site, and its resources. Scrappers do the same, they have bots which are crawling your sites and republishing the content on their own.

What do you suggest to do?

To limit the risk of being scrapped, you need to block "suspect" requests. It ends blocking IP ranges which belong to Data Center, since, scrappers will rarely use individual computers (but they can).

As for the immediate issue :

- ideally, you should contact the owner of the site, to ask him to remove the copied content. (chances that this is useless)

- then, you can contact the host, to try to get the site blocked. (depending where the site is hosted it might work or not).

- you can also, contact the ICANN , and explain your problem, and that the site owner, and his web hosts, are not answering your requests. (I did this once, long ago, and it worked, the domain name was null routed).

- you can also report this site, to search engine, to have them delist it.

None of this is sure to work, but in all events, be sure to provide the maximum information, proving your identity, and that you are the original creator of the content.

[not2easy]

If you are fortunate, the other site has not really gone to the extra trouble to copy or scrape your site and is only showing it via iframe on another site.

Visit the "copy" site and view the page source to see whether it is a simple iframe copy. Then you find the IP address in your access logs and block its access. End of story.

[francesckosky]

Hi.
Thanks for your replies.
Just two more questions:
1) Can be useful reporting the clone website to Google with this tool [support.google.com...] or this tool is for other purposes?
2) if they should ask me, how do I demonstrate that I am the legit owner of the website and not the one who copied it?

Thanks

[not2easy]

You can report your situation there but be aware that doing so does not mean it will fix it without any further effort. See their information about use of the tool: [support.google.com...]

They do expect you to take the appropriate steps before using that tool. It will require your documentation which they require to prevent competitors from causing mischief for legitimate websites. If clicking that button could remove a site from Google's index, it would be abused and they know that.

[NickMNS]

If this:

If you are fortunate, the other site has not really gone to the extra trouble to copy or scrape your site and is only showing it via iframe on another site.

You can prevent framing by following the methods in the article linked below. The article discusses "click-jacking" but the mitigation is the same, basically preventing framing. You should probably do this regardless of whether your site was scrapped or not.
[cheatsheetseries.owasp.org...]

[francesckosky]

Hi.
Thanks very much for your help

Fortunately, the problem has been solved just two days ago: I sent an email to the hosting provider, and that site has been disabled now.
I hope this will not happen again.

Best regards.
Francesco

[edited by: not2easy at 12:47 pm (utc) on May 23, 2021]
[edit reason] formatting [/edit]

[lammert]

Thanks for reporting back. Good to hear the hosting company took the necessary steps.

[not2easy]

That was the one-time fix. It does not prevent them from doing the same thing tomorrow on a different host. To do that you need to work on prevention as mentioned above by NickMNS.

Prevention is better than the cure, the cure, the cure.

[Kendo]

I had this happen once. The culprit replaced his company name with mine. When I questioned him I got "well I had to start somewhere!" and I have to say that I am so sick of that lowtard excuse.