My Site has been stolen

[wilderness]

Hi everyone,
I need some help!
It would seem that my entire website has been stolen, a new header put on it by someone called Canadian365, or that's the domain it is listed under, they have advertisements on it, and everything has been mistranslated.
I was just told about it tonight and so far I have contacted the host to tell them to remove it or I'll get a lawyer on it.
How do I contact Google, Yahoo, and MSN and let them know that there is a site out there copying mine. (I wondered why my site was dropping. Talk about duplicate content!)
What else should I do?
And how the heck did they steal a whole site?????

Thanks ahead!
J Baker

[frost]

Hi,

Check to make sure you domain name hasn't expired, some registrars will give you a few days leeway to renew your domain so you might be able to get it back if it has expired.

[incrediblehelp]

Happens all of the time and usually there is not much you can do about it. If they are not getting traffic or stealing your rankings you shouldn’t worry to much about it.

Now with that being said you do have some options:

1. Call or email them directly and ask them to stop.
2. Call their hoster and explain the situation. They usually don’t take kindly to this stuff and will ask them to take it down
3. Contact the search engines through DMCA fillings:

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (http://www.google.com/intl/en/dmca.html)

4. More WPW threads on the subject:

http://www.webproworld.com/search-engine-optimization-forum/42627-someone-finally-copied-my-website.html (http://www.webproworld.com/../search-engine-optimization-forum/42627-someone-finally-copied-my-website.html)
http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/57919-has-anyone-had-real-success-googles-dmca.html (http://www.webproworld.com/57919-has-anyone-had-real-success-googles-dmca.html)
http://www.webproworld.com/insider-reports/37034-yahoo-dmca-blackhat-techniques.html (http://www.webproworld.com/../insider-reports/37034-yahoo-dmca-blackhat-techniques.html)
http://www.webproworld.com/content-discussion-forum/56905-website-content-stolen.html (http://www.webproworld.com/../content-discussion-forum/56905-website-content-stolen.html)
http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/19260-stolen-website-content-detection.html (http://www.webproworld.com/19260-stolen-website-content-detection.html)

[wilderness]

Ok, as usual, Incrediblehelp has been quick to come to my rescue with some really valuable links. Thanks Jaan, I followed them all and have fired off numerous faxes in the last 24 hours, including the one to google which has my Brother-in-law's stamp on it, and he's a lawyer. Thank heavens for good luck and marrying well.
This in honesty has to be one of the most devastating invasions I've had to experience. I can deal much easier with a home invader I think, because at least I get to shoot him.
In this case, it's most frustrating because all of my hard work over the years is being harvested by some scumbag that refuses to work for a living and would rather steal. The only thing I can state is that I am a determined individual and I have spent the last 24 hours trying to track this bottom feeder down and I will continue. It is my single minded goal at this time to feed his testicles to my dogs. May all scrapers burn in whatever particular Hell that has been designed for them.
J. Baker
P.S. If the moderators find any material here offensive in the face of my anger, please feel free to make adjustments.

[incrediblehelp]

No offense taken, people who scrap and steal content deserve such talk.

[wilderness]

How do they manage to scrape a whole site? I can see copy pasting the html code, but how do they get the images? Surely it would be easier to build your own site than to have to save every image and then re-upload it? Especially in an image heavy site like mine.

As for rankings, I don't think there's any doubt that he has hurt my rankings and he stands much higher in Alexa with my stolen site than my own site does.

[sheena]

How do they manage to scrape a whole site? I can see copy pasting the html code, but how do they get the images? Surely it would be easier to build your own site than to have to save every image and then re-upload it? Especially in an image heavy site like mine.

As for rankings, I don't think there's any doubt that he has hurt my rankings and he stands much higher in Alexa with my stolen site than my own site does.

You are not the only experienced that, most of the website owner don't care about of copying the whole site

[kgun]

How do they manage to scrape a whole site?

"A web crawler (also known as a web spider, web robot, or—especially in the FOAF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_%28software%29) community—web scutter[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler#cite_note-0)) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web) in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler#cite_note-1)
This process is called web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine), use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_%28search_engine%29) the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a website, such as checking links or validating HTML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML) code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming)).
A web crawler is one type of bot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot), or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator) to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink) in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies".

Source: Web crawler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler)

"Advanced Site Crawler 2003 4.2

Description

Allow you to search a website and download images, videos, documents, sounds..."
Brothersoft Editor/ Advanced Site Crawler 2003 is a Windows-based shareware that has two main functions. The first one is to search inside a website that you will choose and will follow one link after the other to search for information. The second function allows you to search a website and download images, videos, documents, sounds and much more! You can download files into separate categories or create a duplicate of the original website".

Source: Download Advanced Site Crawler 2003, Advanced Site Crawler 2003 4.2 Download (http://www.brothersoft.com/advanced-site-crawler-2003-118213.html)

Search term:

advanced site crawler

and you find more information.

Unless you block bad bots in .htaccess (if you are on an Apache server) or make a spider trap, it is done in seconds to copy your whole site.

Related:

Scripts: Spider Blocking :: .htaccess, PHP, Block Bad Bots with .htaccess or PHP (http://techpatterns.com/downloads/spider_blocking.php)

http://evolt.org/article/Using_Apache_to_stop_bad_robots/18/15126/

A useful tool: Copyscape - Website Plagiarism Search - Web Site Content Copyright Protection (http://www.copyscape.com/)