Forum Moderators: phranque
From out of nowhere a completely unrelated domain showed up in Google that seemed to have the entire client site on it. The domain is registered to someone in California with a host in Brazil (not a host the client has ever used). It is down now, but still in the Google cache.
It pulls images from the clients' server and all the links within the pages point to this mystery domain.
Since it is down and only in the cache now we can't tell if it was fully operational at any point. Google did, however, index almost 2k pages from this domain. It is a dynamic site so it would seem that they may have somehow been able to get ahold of the entire site and mirror it. It doesn't seem that any harm was done unless they were able to siphon off ordering info.
Any ideas as to what might have happened, how this would come about, or what to do or check?
Would you say there'd be any value to someone else in operating this copy of a site?
There are any number of cases, especially in certain business areas, of sites being ripped off that way. And often they are detected by one of the things skibum described -- a reference to some file is left in place, in this case the images being pulled from his client's server -- so they stand out in the logs.
One thing that could be done is to change those filenames so they won't be found from that site, or to use mod_rewrite to prevent them from being loaded from this domain. Of course, that might just mean they'll simply load the copied images from their own site and easily be operational again.
If the site's not up currently there's probably not much you could do, or even much worth doing, other than being especially vigilant for it for awhile. If it comes up, contact the regristrant and the host and demand that it be taken down -- they're violating your client's copyright. I've known cases where a DMCA complaint was what finally caused such a site to be removed, but I don't know how effective that would be with a host in Brazil.
