What is the negative impact of a mirrored website?..How do the major search engines treat these? SEO Rankings,

Question

I just noticed today that another company with mirrored my website without my knowledge. What can I do?

Answer 1

Send a DMCA to the three major search engines and they will remove the site from their index, details here:

Google http://www.google.com/dmca.html

Yahoo http://docs.yahoo.com/info/copyright/copyright.html

MSN http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyrtInfrg.htm

Answer 2

Something that I saw happening once was a DNS name (not related to the website where I work) point (alias) to our own machines.

That means that the new domain seemed to be serving the exact same content as ours -- actually the new domain was pointing to our servers!

So we had to reconfigure our apache servers to deny any request whose server host was not one of our own.

I think the idea of the "pirate" is to gather traffic to his domain ... and, one day, if he sees there is enough traffic, he can put his own ads there and make money on someone else's site. Specially if the "pirate" domain gets indexed in the search engines ...

Hey, pls let us know the domain of your site and the one that is "mirroring" you, maybe we can give you a better answer then.

Answer 3

I do not think that they have `mirrored' your website.. they might have just added a link back to your website.. mirroring your website without your knowledge is a breach of law (unless you are using pre-designed templates in various free hosting websites, and even then, nobody should do a toto image).. check the url on the website you mentioned and see if it is yours.. they just cannot copy the url.. it is YOURS

Answer 4

SE could penalize one or both of the sites. Peanlties I've seen range from dropping one or both sites from their index to a loss of PR (Google) and the sites not being cached by the SE. Avoid at all costs!