How to beat your competitor, easy way!

SuperSEO · 12-09-2004, 11:57 AM

I had a PR6 site with over 100K pages indexed. Ranked very well for many of the keywords.

Last month all of my 3rd level pages started showing only the URL (no title & description).

Today I just found out that a foreign registered site is pointing to my IP address through the DNS. When I go to that URL, it's my site, exactly. This URL is new and has no PR. But Google filters kept the Title & Descriptions from that url, but not from my site !@*#&^$#??? Also, a lot of my pages got dropped within 1 month. Last I checked I have only 10K indexed pages left in Google, and out of those only about 500 have full URL, Title, and Description. The rest is just the URL, no title or descriptions.

If I didn't put in the codes to see where my hits are coming, I wouldn't have even known that that site was pointing to my IP.

Moral of the story: If you have a competitor, get a foreign domain name that's very difficult to find out who owns it and point it to the competitor's site through DNS. That site will drop a lot of pages and will suffer in rankings.

Hm... that doesn't sound right!!!

awall19 · 12-09-2004, 12:31 PM

probably there is a bit more to it than that...were they 302 redirecting to you or how were they pointing at you?

arius · 12-09-2004, 01:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SuperSEO

I had a PR6 site with over 100K pages indexed. Ranked very well for many of the keywords...

If I didn't put in the codes to see where my hits are coming, I wouldn't have even known that that site was pointing to my IP...

Hm... that doesn't sound right!!!

How exactly did you find this foreign registered clone site?

SuperSEO · 12-09-2004, 01:56 PM

It's not a 301 Redirect.
It's their DNS pointing to my IP.
All the pages showed up on their site with their URL, but my directory and filenames. It's because I used relative directory "../" structure on all my pages (i had a reason for doing this, SEO related).

My site is ranked very well for the keywords I am targeting. For example, I am ranked in the top 10 for some very competitive keywords with around 90 million pages.

I put in codes on my site to track where my clicks are coming from. The referral URL points to their domain name, so I went there and checked. It turnes out that when I go to that domain name, it looks exactly like my site (and it is b/c their domain name is pointing to my site server's IP address).

longcall911 · 12-09-2004, 08:19 PM

They can only point to a name server. If your site is hosted and they pointed to your hosting service's DNS, it would result in a 404.

To do what you describe, they'd have to 302 redirect, or use the meta refresh to cause a problem for you.

Am I missing something?

funguru · 12-09-2004, 09:20 PM

for people who are registerd with godaddy.com, they give a very simple and free tool to point any website to any domain name... e.g if you buy a domain name wazoo.com you can go to the control panel of godaddy and point it to yahoo.com by writing it in the given text area and then click "ok" ..its that simple.. it only takes 24 hours to complete the request and the result would be exactly the same as described by SUPERSEO. Anyhing indexed by search engines would look like www.wazoo.com/members/profile..blah blah (the original would be www.yahoo.com/members/profile..blah bhal)
Also i think go daddy has the option of editing the header information to the domain name.

arius · 12-10-2004, 10:22 AM

A possible remedy is to:
° Do a whois lookup
° Contact the registrar
° Complain to their tech support that you want the site taken down
° Contact a lawyer and have them send a cease and desist letter

realestate · 12-11-2004, 06:24 PM

Contact G! Either there is a gap in their algorithm or they are the people who can/should fix the problem (or both). Legal action not worth imo, unless you have some ties with govt or are a corporate..

mazsola · 12-17-2004, 02:16 PM

this is pretty scary, a lawyer is no use if you are dealing with someone outside of the US, don't you think?

shootert · 02-05-2005, 09:07 PM

posted in wrong thread

UKZJ007 · 02-06-2005, 05:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mazsola

this is pretty scary, a lawyer is no use if you are dealing with someone outside of the US, don't you think?

If they are in the UK then a lawyer is still useful!

notepad · 02-06-2005, 03:33 PM

...just a thought, but have you tried threats of severe physical violence against them?

I used filthy language together with an extreme threatening posture to resolve a similar problem a couple of years back.

SuperSEO · 02-07-2005, 01:52 PM

Can't find out where they are from. The domain info they gave is all wrong. The DNS is in China.

Shawn · 02-07-2005, 02:05 PM

why can't you block their IP address from accessing anything on your site? And is this a meta redirect issue or a domain forwarding issue?

Gevorg · 02-07-2005, 02:13 PM

There is a simple solution to it.
You can analyze HOST field in the header and if it's not yours then throw 404 page.
I am not sure where you hosting your site but on IIS windows it's easy to do with IIS managment tool.

Idea is the same how people host multiple websites on one ip address.

George

GilGul · 02-07-2005, 09:25 PM

Thats true, a simple 'Hotlinking Protection' through your htaccess (in Apache) should do the job. If the page / image request does not comef from your site throw a custom 404 page on there. You can even post the copying company information and that they attempted to steal your pages...

You can try this tool I have: http://www.youontop.com/web-tools/custom.php it will create a custom .htaccess for you (put the file in your root folder). You can then use this tool: http://www.youontop.com/web-tools/index.php to run a request for any image on your site. It'll tell you if the protection works or not.

Hope this helps