Copied Site and DMCA Requests

[casionmark]

Hi -

Someone has copied parts of a site of ours (50 to 100 pages) and uploaded it to two different domains. I've seen a few threads about DMCA but can't quite find the answer to these questions:

1. The infringing pages are indexed by google. Can this negatively impact our rankings, or can Google likely see that our site is the original? The copies are bad copies - stylesheets are missing so content is a bit all over the place and looking at AHREFs the copied pages don't appear to rank much at all.

2. If they are impacting our rankings is it enough to get Google to remove the pages from their index or do I need to file a DMCA with the hosting / registrar company to get the sites removed entirely. I've tried this and they are really un-responsive.

Thanks,
Mark

[baldidiot]

1. The infringing pages are indexed by google. Can this negatively impact our rankings, or can Google likely see that our site is the original? The copies are bad copies - stylesheets are missing so content is a bit all over the place and looking at AHREFs the copied pages don't appear to rank much at all.

Google will try to identify the original but it doesn't always get it right.

2. If they are impacting our rankings is it enough to get Google to remove the pages from their index or do I need to file a DMCA with the hosting / registrar company to get the sites removed entirely. I've tried this and they are really un-responsive.

Up to you and how much of an issue you think it is. If you file a DMCA with google it will only remove the site from google, it will still be live for other search engines and real world visitors. Sometimes that's sufficient. Other times you might want to get it taken down completely.


Most hosts will have an abuse email address or contact. Who's the host and registrar?

[casionmark]

Thanks. I've tried the registrar, Webnames.ca. But they say as they are not the hosting provider so can't address the issue. The hosting is hidden by Cloudflare so I've raised a Abuse Report with them. They have passed it onto the hosting provider.

[baldidiot]

You can submit an abuse report to cloudflare: https://abuse.cloudflare.com/ - they have an option for DMCA.

Guessing you might have done that already but mentioning it just in case!

[casionmark]

Thanks, yes already done that. Not sure it will get a response from the hosting provider though.

[fullbenefit]

Just like it was suggested, report to Cloudflare/Hosting providers also report their websites to Google as spam: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform

Either this will help or Google will deindex them at some point themselves. So no need to worry.

[lunaraurora]

In my personal experience, i had the same situation for thousands of pages exactly cloned by 2 sites under cloudflare.
First of all, even if in rare cases, results on serp can overtake your position, it happen.

Also be sure not to be infected; they usually runs crawlers programs externally, but sometime they could have exploited your server, so i would inspect your logs carefully.

What worked for me was to fill a DMCA to Google with a list of (max 1000 x day) of the offender links and the same list of your 'original' links counterpart; you can input part of the cloned text of the 1st link as example and explain to Google that all the following links in the list are clones like the 1st one. With this procedure i cleaned the 2 offending sites from the serp in few days.

It's then important that you shield your system from bots and crawlers or this will happen again and again; if you are on apache i would consider to switch to nginx and protect your system with a firewall (csf firewall is a good one), and intrusion prevention software like fail2ban and nginx/apache bad bot blocker (just to start).

[mickyfu]

I'm no expert but would conical urls help?

DMCA? I think you would have to have been registered and paying DMCA in the first place?

I also think DMCA is an American thing? Other countries couldn't give a toss about DMCA take-down.

If the site is not ranking and copying your content would it be an issue? I'd guess not unless it starts outranking you and taking your traffic. Again I think conical urls would help here.

Duplicate content is not something new to the Internet. Look at all the 100s of news sites that all copy each other.

I'd go for hosting take down, registrar take down, icann take down and then there is the likes of afilias.info that deal with .bet .info and so on, off the top of my head. These companies that deal with tdls are good for takedowns

Plus if you are using your own unique images tag them with a copyright to prove to hosting / registrar that they are outright ripping your content.

[Madz]

I'm no expert but would conical urls help?

DMCA? I think you would have to have been registered and paying DMCA in the first place?

I also think DMCA is an American thing? Other countries couldn't give a toss about DMCA take-down.

If the site is not ranking and copying your content would it be an issue? I'd guess not unless it starts outranking you and taking your traffic. Again I think conical urls would help here.

Duplicate content is not something new to the Internet. Look at all the 100s of news sites that all copy each other.

I'd go for hosting take down, registrar take down, icann take down and then there is the likes of afilias.info that deal with .bet .info and so on, off the top of my head. These companies that deal with tdls are good for takedowns

Plus if you are using your own unique images tag them with a copyright to prove to hosting / registrar that they are outright ripping your content.

Great advice MickyFu. Another thing you mentioned to me once in the past, something else that may be effective is contacting the relevant affiliate programs these sites are listing and tell the affiliate mangers about the copying.

Some AM's will work with you and threaten to ban their user accounts for copying other peoples websites.

Its worth a shot and I know its worked for other people in the past if they have a decent AM.