21.co.uk - Fake Website Copying It - hiddengemsfilmfestiva _com

[Madz]

Hi guys,

I noticed something very strange today when doing some research on my rankings after the recent Google updates that started a few days ago.

I found this website - hxxp://www.hiddengemsfilmfestival_com/ which is a new website in the rankings, it came out of nowhere after the recent update ( as many others have, most are very poor quality ). This website though is an exact duplicate of 21.co.uk and is ranking well for some keywords and is pulling in traffic.

Its identical. Im not sure if its being set up to de-fraud people as some sort of phishing type of website? I have contacted 21.co.uk to let them know and reported it to Google but the way Google has been rolling out these recent updates that seem to be targeting affiliates in the casino niche Im not sure if they will do anything.

What do you guys think? Do you think its a phishing type of page?

[PaulEchere]

Well, it looks very similar to the original and will ask you for credentials, so they definitely want to get a hold of then and it is definitely some sort of phishing attempt.

[Madz]

Its ranking quite well for a lot of their keywords and its pulling in traffic. I cant understand how Google can rank this though

[Pokerface]

Wow, that's crazy! Total phishing scam.

[Madz]

Wow, that's crazy! Total phishing scam.

Yeah it looks like. It has 397 pages indexed in Google! Its ranking well for many of the same keywords as 21.co.uk

Looking at Wayback machine it looks like its only recently been mirroring 21.co.uk before that it looks to have been a Chinese website. It was back in 2019 that it was a film based website as the name would suggest.

What gets me is Google seems to favour these old domains with copied or spammy content all of a sudden. I see tons of sites that seem to rank for crap content that does not make sense, all of them very similar as if they are using AI software to post on them all and it changes the text a little on each one.

They all rank well and pull in some decent traffic. Its like the Google core updates are having a far worse effect on listings lately.

[universal4]

I obfuscated the url of the site doing the copying.

Rick
Universal4

[Pokerface]

LOL ... there's that word again and I still had to look it up again, I totally forgot what it meant. LOL