I purchased a theme from a popular template site nearly a year ago and used it to design a site to promote it's products as an affiliate. I also used a freelancer from the site to write some unique articles for me. I was not doing too bad generating decent commissions within a short period of time. I recently moved to a new web host with my own dedicated IP for my site and whilst going through my AWStats, I noticed that my site had double the amount of visitors during a given period. The visitors were being referred by a site with an unusual name. When I checked the site, lo and behold! An exact duplicate of my site. Upon closer inspection, it seems like they have pointed their DNS to our servers as the email listed on it is our own and when I did a test by making a small change to my site and uploading it, the offending site displayed the change also. The only reason I can think of why someone would want to do this is of negative SEO (excluding gross incompetence). Our site has slowly climbed in Google search listings and occupies a number of good positions. Having someone duplicate the exact content in it's entirety, will in effect redflag our site as spam and may incur a severe penalty by Google. So far, our site has not been effected in rankings. When I checked the domain in the Whois.net database, the following info is provided: Domain Name: OFFENDINGSITE.COM (not actual website) Registrar: CLOUD GROUP LIMITED Whois Server: whois.hostingservicesinc.net Referral URL: http://www.resell.biz Name Server: NS1.SUGARDNS.NET Name Server: NS2.SUGARDNS.NET Name Server: NS3.SUGARDNS.NET Name Server: NS4.SUGARDNS.NET Status: clientTransferProhibited My first move would be to contact the registrar the Cloud Group, however doing a quick search reveals that they are affiliated with the UK2group company and on their website they state the following: All Cloud Group Limited domains are registered via our domain reseller brand, www.resell.biz and all domain name support enquires should be addressed to the resell.biz support team. Should I contact www.resell.biz ? If the actual registrar has used a privacy service to hide their real details, will resell.biz release this info? Next, I wish to notify their webhosting provider, however, sugardns.net is interwoven with quite a few IP's and are not really a webhost. I don't know who to contact. Any pointers and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thankyou.
Did you ever consider contacting the owner of the domain name, especially if this might have been an error or mistake?
Thanks for the reply. The offending website does not have any contact details on the duplicate site. It provides my contact details (email only and a contact form). It's either a redirect or DNS that point to our servers. So would contacting www.resell.biz, be the appropriate avenue to take first? Looking at the whois info above who do youthink the webhost might be? This is the third time I have been burned. Just last year my well established site of over 10 years with top rankings for 100's of keywords was destroyed after the Penguin update. When I checked my backlinks, overnight they had increased by 40,000, most of then autogenerated, that included links to porn, gambling and pharma sites. Duplicate content was spun and posted on several article sites. All my own links were natural and organic. I'm pretty sure that someone decided that I should not stay on top slots in Google listings and my niche is very, very competitive. I started this new site to try and get myself back on my feet again and now I see myself being knocked again with a duplicate site. Thanks
Is the website your own? From the above edits, it sounds like it is and not a duplicate site. Look up the domain in another whois and get the entire information. The registrant contact information must be listed. If it isn't, contact the registrar.
contact resell.biz and tell them what is going on. Inform them that they need to change the nameservers to point away from your domain. resell.biz is pretty cooperative.
My apologies for not keeping up-to-date with this thread. I did contact Resell.biz and as brandma rightly pointed out, yes, Resell.biz are very cooperative. When I contacted them, they informed that if the domain registrar did not move the offending site within 7 days, they would suspend their account and that's exactly what they did after 7 days had lapsed. So, all credit to Resell.biz