Someone copied my whole site

[RacingJim]

Just found out someone has copied one of my websites, word for word. The rankings of the website I've got have been a bit ropey, don't know if it's anything to do with this being seen as duplicate content etc.

I've just sent the guy an email saying remove it and I'm also contacting his hosting provider and domain registrar.

Just a heads up really thought I'd post it on here, you should all check a few pages of your websites at copyscape.com to check if you've been copied, it's something I was too lazy to check until today and I just wonder now how long this duplicate site has been up there.

[wonderpunter]

That's the problem with static sites Content that never changes, Google usually will rank the original 1st, unless he has higher Authority.. but he should not rank, that trick worked years ago but now G is much smarter now

[Progger]

its enought for the ripper to spin the content...and the rank coming soon...

[-Shay-]

Is the person who has copied your site a GPWA member?

[Progger]

gpwa member or not....Seal or not...the badge says nothing for me...
the only thing what you can do is write to the hoster for takedown...

regards

[pinkytoe]

Contact the affiliate programs he is using too.

[sweetbet]

You might also want to block bad bots from your (other) site/s using the .htaccess file to make your site a little bit harder to copy.

[TheGooner]

Indeed - Sweetbet makes a good point these guys are just looking for an easy way to scrape content and set up ripoffs.
If the bot failed on your site then I suspect they would move on to the next victim.

Good luck getting it taken down but it can be hard to get a response ... what country is the new site domiciled in?
Targeting their money stream (the affiliate sites listed) as suggested by pinkytoe is a good step to getting a reaction.

[vardan]

You might also want to block bad bots from your (other) site/s using the .htaccess file to make your site a little bit harder to copy.

Hello,

Would you explain how to do it ? Or may be some links of tutorials ?

Regards.

[sweetbet]

Hello,

Would you explain how to do it ? Or may be some links of tutorials ?

Regards.

I'll pm you a code to add.

[Maria F]

I'll pm you a code to add.

Hi Sweetbet,

Could you please send me the code via PM too?

Thanks in advance!

[sweetbet]

Sure Maria

[RacingJim]

I'll pm you a code to add.

And me if you can mate!

[RacingJim]

Got a reply from the webmaster in question this morning and the site has been fully removed. Still annoying and a copyright breach, I'll be monitoring things a lot more closely now with the copyscape alerts etc.

Also got a reply from the hosting company about filing a DMCA Notification which would have been the road to go down if he hadn't removed it.

[baldidiot]

Got a reply from the webmaster in question this morning and the site has been fully removed. Still annoying and a copyright breach, I'll be monitoring things a lot more closely now with the copyscape alerts etc.

Unfortunately for this purpose copyscape probably isn't going to help as anyone that's scraping your site is likely to just block copyscape (the copyscape bots pay attention to robots.txt and they use the same IP's so can be blocked by the server). There's tons of info on blackhat sites about it...

It's still useful for checking content you've received is unique, but as far as I can see that's about it.

Another way of checking if someone has copied your site take a snippet of text and google it within quotation marks - if they're wanting to let the site rank in google they'll allow googlebot to crawl it (although if they have other plans for the site that don't involve the big G this won't help either, but I imagine this is the most common purpose of copying a site).

You could also set up google alerts for key snippets on pages that don't change rather than repeatedly having to search.

[Progger]

you cant block this....bot

http://www.httrack.com/ check this..

[sweetbet]

Another way of checking if someone has copied your site take a snippet of text and google it within quotation marks - if they're wanting to let the site rank in google they'll allow googlebot to crawl it (although if they have other plans for the site that don't involve the big G this won't help either, but I imagine this is the most common purpose of copying a site). You could also set up google alerts for key snippets on pages that don't change rather than repeatedly having to search.

That's the best way to do it.

[universal4]

I agree that knowing whether the person involved was a GPWA Private Member would help.

Usually when this happens, notifying Anthony or myself when they are a Pvt member helps us make a note of it in case there are future reports, and/or if they refuse to take care of the issue.

Those with a pattern of copied content or those that refuse to fix copy issues can lose their Pvt Membership as well as having the Seal and any links disabled.

Entire site copies are fairly drastic, and one would think excuses such as "it was a mistake" or "it was a new designer" often do not cut it in most cases.

All cases are handled on a one-by-one instance.

Rick
Universal4

[oldman]

knock on wood i've never been copied. :/

[PROFRBcom]

The good news is, someone really liked your content! Hopefully your visitors will as well