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I have the following problem:

I operate an online service and about 2 months ago a Copy Cat clone appeared under a strange domain unknown to me. My portal is simply mirrored/redirected to another domain entirely and live without my permission of course.This foreign domain was massively pushed up with SEO techniques so that the copy cat domain now has better ratings and a higher trust score than my original.

I have already taken these measures: I have reported the site several times to Google and the Domain Provider but since 4 weeks nobody does anything! I have blocked the IP address of the scammer several times but as soon as I do that he just changes it immediately...

What can I do about this and what measures can I take to protect my business from this in the future?

I really appreciate any professional input I can get!

Thank you very much in advance!

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First, lock down your website to prevent further copying.

Then you'll want to contact Google, and then the registrar + host of the domain that the clone is at. It will be between the host and registrar to get the site taken down. Before contacting either the host or registrar you need to submit a ticket to Google Support.

Google Support

They'll first validate your issue, and then likely ask you to provide a list of urls of the cloned site. It's important that you do this first because with this step you're telling Google what needs to get pulled from their index. If the site gets suspended before they can do this, duplicate content in Google's index will plague your SEO until the clone is de-indexed - which might take anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months.

Dealing with the Host & Registrar

After you've submitted a url list to Google support you can reach out to the registrar and host. In a terminal scan the output of: whois example.com. That will give you that information. Look for an email address for filing complaints. For example GoDaddy is [email protected].

It might take a while before you get a response, but you should receive an email with info about how to file a complaint and a page/form for you to do so. It might take some time after you file the complaint but eventually they'll issue the wannabe SEO a suspension.

Preventing this in the future

Prevent my site from being copied

Hopefully this helps and best of luck to you.

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It all depends on what is the person doing to your website to clone it because here are many methods they can use, but some recommendations I can give you is to:

  • Add to your code a script to prevent your website from being loaded into another domain, comparing the browser URL to your website URL. This can easily be made in PHP for example.

  • Disable the use of or via code for your website.

  • Install a DNS security plugin like "Cloudflare DNS Security".

  • Read the Logs on your Cpanel.

  • Use a reverse image search to see if some of your images are being used on another website. You can use Google Images or Tineye.

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