Someone has copied my entire site!!!!

[chandrika]

I just found this exac copy of my site which is 100's 000's pages all just totally copied to some other domain!!!

my site findallsorts dot com

the copied site

centerposthosting dot com

Its so weird because its got my adsense and affilaite codes, so all i can think is this is some way to try and damage my ratings, what do you think??

I did a whois and its some us colege guy, I spoke to his mum and emailed him....what else can I do if he won comly and take this copy down?

[wige]

When I go to centerposthosting dot com, I get a GoDaddy parked page message.

[chandrika]

hmmm....i am still seeing my site there and i found it had been there a while as i picked up on i from my stats, in the links from section.

very weird,

the college guy who domain is registered to has contacted me and said that he thinks the domai has been hijacked and he will try get the site down asap.

But I am still seeing it, have cleared my cache etc...

odd

[crankydave]

All I'm seeing is a parking page as well.

Dave

[wige]

What is the exact url you are going to?

Second, if you are still seeing the page in about two hours, try pinging the domain name and post what the IP address is.

(On a Windows PC, press Windows Key + R, enter "cmd" in the Run Dialog, then type "ping domainname.com" in the command window. This will show the IP address for the site you are accessing.)

[chandrika]

This is the very odd thing.

The domain that seems to have my site on is centerpointhosting dot com

When I do a whois lookup for that domain my dedicated servers ip address is showing for that domain. Which as it is dedicated server I dont think the Ip should be shared with anyone, so its rather odd.

I just pinged the domain name also and again my supposed dedicated servers ip address is coming up?

How could this be, only my domains are hosted on my server, the guy who owns that domain is saying its some name server problem that he has contacted his host about.

[wige]

Is your dedicated server on the same network as your computer?

If so, there is probably a routing issue. If not, most likely the hosts file on your computer got messed up, or you are having DNS issues. Basically, when you try to access their domain name, your computer/network/ISP sends the query to your own server, which responds (as it should) with your own web site.

[advancedmerchant]

Strange, I get a bulletin board forum with only one post in it......

[suzstephens]

In your first post, you listed the domain as centerPOSThosting.com rather than POINT. That's the site with the bulletin board. For centerpointhosting.com, I get the parked domain message.

[benc007]

I only see a bulletin board forum as well.

[powersitedesign]

I get a parked page there also, not for sure what's going on there. But to get back to the question that you originally asked about what else could you do...

If it was me, I would probably contact the domain registrar that holds the domain, I would shoot them straight and let them know what's going on and then ask them what they might do to help out the situation, I think that they probably have some obligation somewhere binding whoever the domain owner is to use the domain legally, if he's using your content exactly it's probably not on the up and up, in my opinion anyway.

Another thing I would try to do is to get in touch w/ the guy, you mentioned talking to his Mom, I would keep that going until they get enough of you. ha.

One thing that I have found, and I am not for sure where you are located, etc., but even in this day and age the extent of what you can do legally to someone in another country as far as lawsuits, judgements, etc., depends entirely on where you are at and where they are located. For instance, if I am in the United States or Canada and have issues with a person stealing my content, etc., in Iran, I am going to have a hard time in the court system going after them. I do understand however that there are attorneys out there nowadays that specialize in international law and handle a lot of internet related cases such as what it appears you are going through.

Hope this helps, I have been doing this a long time and it still amazes me what people do sometimes.

[chandrika]

Hi,
it was centerposthosting, but it has been fixed now, the owner of domain contacted their host who said it was some name server problem they were having and it appears now to be fixed and the domain is now showing his forum.

Odd, but fixed anyway, so ok.

Thanks

[gavinscott]

I would have thought that this is a domain-forwarding issue: that somehow the domain name centrepointhosting has been misrouted to your server. This seems to have been cleared now, but I believe it can take a while for this to take effect globally.

[Stu Wright]

Originally Posted by wige

(On a Windows PC, press Windows Key + R, enter "cmd" in the Run Dialog, then type "ping domainname.com" in the command window. This will show the IP address for the site you are accessing.)

Hi Wige, I am interested in the IP reveal as I often get spam I would like to block. I tried to do what you said and got something saying 'is not recognised as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file'.

Any ideas please.

Thanks

Stu Wright

[hostBrain]

You'd only usually be able to block spam via ip at the server level.
Do you have a dedicated server? If not, ask your host if they are doing any rbl checking and dictionary attack blocking.

After that, then you are generally looking at text filtering

[wige]

Spam is typically a different issue. The ping "trick" is simply a quick way of finding out what IP address your ISP has associated with a given domain name. If someone is spamming your e-mail or your server, they likely forge the domain name which would cause ping to give irrelevant information. You would need to find the IP address that is listed in the e-mail (search the forum for "e-mail spoofing" for some related threads).

What operating system are you using? Ping should be available on any version of Windows and Linux, Macs have a GUI based version.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by Stu Wright

Hi Wige, I am interested in the IP reveal as I often get spam I would like to block. I tried to do what you said and got something saying 'is not recognised as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file'.

Any ideas please.

Thanks

Stu Wright

Remove the quotes.

Dave

[yougottakickalittle]

Even though your problem is solved, I think this is an important question to answer.
If one of us were to find our pages and content stolen and used on another site, it is a major problem.
I would always start by emailing the offending site's owner and politely asking them to remove the borrowed content, citing your copyright to the information.
If they don't comply within a reasonable time period, I would follow up with a more official cease and desist letter, sent via registered mail to the address listed in their WHOIS information.
If that doesn't prove successful, I'd then attempt to contact their hosting company, explaining the situation and politely informing them of your pending legal action to get the site taken down.
As long as you can prove that you own the copyright to that information, I would think the hosting company would work with you to remove the offending site.

[tomcatuk]

Originally Posted by chandrika

Its so weird because its got my adsense and affilaite codes, so all i can think is this is some way to try and damage my ratings, what do you think??

Log into your Adsense account and explicitly tell it which domains your ADs can appear on to protect your account from this stuff.

Affiliate links might not pose a problem, but you'd need to look into that.

[chandrika]

Yes I hadnt thought of how it would affect my adsense status.

In fact since this happened, I have found two more strange domains displaying my site.

durmakyokyoladevam dot com

ipinikoparan dot com

These domain names when pinged show my IP for findallsorts 75.127.68.75, its really weird, it must be some kind of nameserver error, to do with my server, but rather odd.

I am not getting much resonse from host support yet, I dont think they know either.

[Linknz]

Originally Posted by chandrika

I just found this exac copy of my site which is 100's 000's pages all just totally copied to some other domain!!!

Hi I have just sent our search engines webspider over to both sites and all we find is a hardly used Forum with about one message within it.

We didn't find any duplicate content at all and we do keep a database full of such information which helps us to spot the bad sites, we usually drop them from our index..

I would imagine that what may have happened is some form or error within a DNS server some where that pointed people over to the wrong place.

Your site is now testing quite well, it is designed quite well and we managed to get two new keywords from your site..
I would suggest that you change some of your keywords because they are quite common and may not be helping your site to get found.

<meta name="keywords" content="price comparison, compare prices, shop uk, shop usa, find products" />

You could get better results if you increased the number of keywords you have.

<meta name="description" content="Find All Sorts of products and compare prices. Shop in the UK & the USA!" />

And it does appear that your description could do with a little tweak and try adding some new ones..

[Linknz]

Originally Posted by chandrika

Yes I hadnt thought of how it would affect my adsense status.

In fact since this happened, I have found two more strange domains displaying my site.

durmakyokyoladevam dot com

ipinikoparan dot com

.

Well your domain seems to have a few oddities with it's DNS servers!

OK. Your direct parent zone exists, which is good. Some domains (usually third or fourth level domains, such as example.co.us) do not have a direct parent zone ('co.us' in this example), which is legal but can cause confusion.

Your NS records at the parent servers are:

ns1.clareross.com. [75.127.68.74] [TTL=172800] [US]
ns2.clareross.com. [75.127.68.75] [TTL=172800] [US]
[These were obtained from h.gtld-servers.net]

And most importantly..
ERROR: One or more of your nameservers reports that it is an open DNS server. This usually means that anyone in the world can query it for domains it is not authoritative for (it is possible that the DNS server advertises that it does recursive lookups when it does not, but that shouldn't happen). This can cause an excessive load on your DNS server. Also, it is strongly discouraged to have a DNS server be both authoritative for your domain and be recursive (even if it is not open), due to the potential for cache poisoning (with no recursion, there is no cache, and it is impossible to poison it). Also, the bad guys could use your DNS server as part of an attack, by forging their IP address. Problem record(s) are:

Server 75.127.68.74 reports that it will do recursive lookups. [test] Server 75.127.68.75 reports that it will do recursive lookups.

ERROR: Although you have at least 2 NS records, they both point to the same server, resulting in a single point of failure. You are required to have at least 2 nameservers per RFC 1035 section 2.2.

So it looks like you have an error within the DNS servers that are pointing to your domain..

ERROR: The IP of one or more of your mail server(s) have no reverse DNS (PTR) entries/* (if you see "Timeout" below, it may mean that your DNS servers did not respond fast enough)*/. RFC1912 2.1 says you should have a reverse DNS for all your mail servers. It is strongly urged that you have them, as many mailservers will not accept mail from mailservers with no reverse DNS entry. You can double-check using the 'Reverse DNS Lookup' tool at the DNSstuff site if you recently changed your reverse DNS entry (it contacts your servers in real time; the reverse DNS lookups in the DNS report use our local caching DNS server). The problem MX records are:
78.68.127.75.in-addr.arpa [No reverse DNS entry (rcode: 3 ancount: 0) (check it)]

So I hope this can help you out by solving the problem for you, those of us that own and run search engines are usually quite clued up..

All the best
Dave Andrews from down in New Zealand..

[wige]

Just out of curiosity, try an nslookup, and see what you get.

On Windows, press the Windows Key + R, then enter nslookup. You should get a window similar to a command prompt. (You can also enter nslookup at the command prompt.) The first lines will show the URLs of your nameservers. These should not be local addresses in most cases. For example, on a home network, your nameserver should not be the same as your router.

At the prompt, enter your domain name, and the domains that are showing as duplicated. See if they resolve to the same IP address. If not, this may actually fix the problem by resetting the hosts file on your computer. (Learned so much rebuilding my company nameserver this morning.) The hosts file is a temporary cache of known domain-IP pairs that the operating system does not have to keep rechecking unless the remote server is not found or returns an error.

When I test this from my location, I see the other domain names pointing to another IP that is in the same block as yours (.75 instead of .78 ). Actually, that is interesting... when I ping you or do an nslookup, the IP address I get is .78, and .75 for the ipini... domain with duplicated content. You are reporting the other IP for both.