: Someone has cloned my WordPress blog, how do I prevent it from hurting SEO? My WordPress blog is completely cloned. That clone site is updating in real time with my blog. I am surprised that

@Si4351233

If the site produces backlinks to you it is important to use the Google Disavow tool otherwise the algorithm will be working against you, regardless.
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
create a .txt file and add:

domain:thedamnsitethatcloned.com


then upload it to Google via Webmaster Tools.

Here are exactly the steps that I would take to resolve this issue. I know that a lot of webmasters face this issue. I have had this problem before and there does not seem to be a straight answer on Google (ironically) (which is why I want to help). Matt Cutts is the dude who you are supposed to listen to about these issues, but listening to him is like trying to win a game of chess against a supercomputer inside a burning house (no help to be found).

The short Cutts:


Register with DMCA and put the badge on your website.
Gather all copied content by pasting the first 60 words from your website into Google and submut VIA www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard DMCA requests will only accept permalinks.
Disavow EVERY site which has copied content linking back to you. Do this on every page of your website.


My first answer was to disavow the domain, but I forgot mention that you need to disavow:

AND
non


(Google counts them as two separate domains).

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@Alves908

(In addition to @John 's answer.)


Is there any way to tell Google not to index that site?


Rather curious that whilst they appear to have cloned everything (including your XML sitemaps*1), they have not cloned your robots.txt file. In fact, the robots.txt on that site actively blocks crawling of everything! So there would not seem to be anything to do in this respect. Doing a site search on that domain returns just the bare domain and a notice stating that its blocked by robots.txt.

(Rather curious what their intention would be in doing this? You could perhaps just assume that they made a mistake with robots.txt - and that maybe so - but this looks more like a deliberate exception to me?)

Also, whilst your XML sitemaps are cloned, they aren't updating the URLs in them (as they are doing on the main site pages), so they are still pointing back to your site.

*1 Regarding the XML sitemap(s). On your site "sitemap.xml" is actually a redirect to "sitemap_index.xml" and the cloned site has actually cloned the redirect... which redirects back to your site! (Surely a mistake on their part.) "sitemap_index.xml" is just an index, linking to 4 other sitemaps. If any of these actual sitemaps are requested directly on the cloned site then they are correctly cloned and the URLs updated. However, I would have said that these sitemaps are unlikely to be found on the cloned site because of the initial redirect of "sitemap.xml". (?) Although if they did submit "sitemap_index.xml" directly then that would obviously get around the redirect.

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@Pope3001725

They're simply loading your site via a server-side script. All you need to do is block their server's IP address via .htaccess. Simply open up your server's access logs, open the cloned page on their site, then view your log for the new entry and you'll have their IP address.

It also wouldn't hurt to submit a DMCA request to Google as well but this will not really be necessary as that content will instantly disappear once you block their IP address.

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