: Another website is mirroring and ranks above my site in search results There is a site of ill-repute known as thedirty which has completely mirrored my site and now has links appearing on Google

@Sue5673885

This is called a Google Proxy Hack, and it happened to me as well.

First things first:


Submit a DMCA complaint to the Web Host. Use this link to create a correctly formed complaint, and send it to the host's support or abuse email. If the host is in the US, they must take down the site. Even if they are not based in the US, they may choose to take down the site anyway. (That happened to me once.)
Use Google DMCA tool to request the mirrored URL's be removed from its search results.
Use Google's Scraper Report to report the failure in Google's algorithm.


Fundamentally though, this a failure on Google's part. For all that they say about ranking being based on "quality original content", this is an absurdly simple counter-example that quite frankly is just embarrassing.

Hopefully if enough people complain about it, eventually Google will get its act together and write the 10 lines of code it takes to check that a site is an exact mirror of a previously established site.

Also, be aware that using canonical URLs do not always work in this instance. Many of these proxy scripts change the canonical URLs to point to the mirror site, thus rendering them useless.

Finally, be aware that they may have also spammed your main site with garbage links in order to damage your rankings. (This happened to me as well.)

If you do some searching and creative thinking, there are some ways to fight back. I really don't think it's a good idea to publish a complete list here because that just makes the hackers' lives easier.

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@Lengel546

Like others have mentioned, filing a DMCA complaint and a copyright civil law suit may be the best options.

For the new content that you publish, you can consider notifying about your site updates on social media (Twitter, Facebook etc.) as soon as you post. The timestamp recorded there can be a fair indicator that you wrote first in case you have to prove it. Through Google Webmaster Tools, you can enforce a setting to have Googlebot crawl your site often. Assuming, popular search engines index your web-pages regularly (use the site operator, site:example.com, to find out) the date in the cached copy can be used as a rough indicator of when the content was published.

Also for the new content that you publish, you can embed watermarks within images and place comments within JS files indicating that you are the original owner of those files.

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@Chiappetta492

A little late for you but best idea to protect your website (in the future) would be this:

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@Heady270

You could track their IP (or IPs) and return totally different content for them to mirror - whatever you like. This way you get free space for advertising whatever, and you can use their high position in Google to your advantage.

I once used this to simply explain to the users on the mirrored website that this is the wrong domain. You can also post a simple HTTP redirect header.

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@Ann8826881

You can file a DMCA complaint and if you are in the U.S., you can file a copyright civil law suit.

Here is a link to a short answer that explains how the DMCA complaint can help anyone:

Do you have to be in the United States to file a DMCA complaint?

... and another one the explains more...

How much of your content needs to be copied before you can file a DMCA complaint?

If you are in the U.S., you can hire a lawyer that is familiar with copyright issues and have them send a cease and desist letter. Give them 10 days (real days and not business days though business days would be fine too) to remove the content. You want to capture snap-shots of the offending site for your evidence and snap-shots of your site as well. If you check to see if a page has been removed, check the site directly and not search results.

If the page has not been removed within the time period, you can file a federal civil case that will take at least ,000 to defend and hardly cost you anything. You will be in the drivers seat. It is likely that a settlement can be had for at least ,000 and possibly more. You can get your costs back too. What is important is to offer a no-cost option to rectify the problem hence the cease and desist letter. After that, you are clear to file a case without responsibility to the defendant.

One other note is that you will need to demonstrate damages if you go to court. Loss of search traffic is damages. Here you will work with your attorney to collect metrics that illustrate loss of traffic and you will need to monetize the value of that traffic. Of course you can assume higher numbers here even with a %100 conversion rate. Just in case, I would be collecting metrics on traffic loss using Google Analytics and your log file analysis software today and into the future.

Please know that filing a case is not difficult or very expensive especially compared to the damages you are experiencing now and into the future. Copyright infringements have been going down lately, but those few that violate copyright are much bolder these days. We need to stop these people and the only real way is to put a cost factor into the business strategy that makes copyright infringement non-profitable.

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@Kevin317

If they're just mirroring your site by feeding your site through a proxy script or regurgitating your HTML verbatum, you can add canonical URLs to your pages. This will let Google know your content is the original source and to show your URL in the search results, not their's.

Submit a DMCA request to Google. They're a little slow with them but they will ultimately remove those pages from their index.

Disavowing the links is a smart move.

I don't know if blocking the users is helpful though. Maybe putting a message at the top of your pages for them letting them know you are the original site and the other is a fraud might be a better solution.

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