Spammy Website Framed My Site & Stole Rankings

[JamesPenn]

Hi

One of the pages of my website was starting to gather some real traction in Google rankings and hit 3500 visitors per day.

This is the page: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/drinking-apple-cider-vinegar-benefits/

On 11th January search traffic to this page fell to virtually 0. The rest of the site rankings were unaffected.

Yesterday I tried searching for some of the main keywords I was ranking for and instead of my search listing, this was appearing:

Image: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/weird-rankings.jpg

It is in the exact position I was ranking in, but instead this evn . moe site has stolen my ranking. Upon opening the website, it is simply my original article page in an iframe. If you look at the source code of the offending website, you will see what I mean.

Hopefully now you are getting a 403 forbidden error as my host blocked referrals from that site but they still hold my rankings.

Has anyone ever seen this before?

How was this done?

And how can I get my ranking back?

Thanks in advance,

James

[KevnJr]

Report this to Google thru the Feedback section of your webmaster tools. Google "should" discredit the thief and return your status. Be prepared to verify the content is your original work.

Good Luck,

KJr

[GPainter]

caught my interest with this one, iframe alone shouldn't cause the issue. The 403 should help and after a couple days return to as was.  you can also submit a DMCA request - http://www.dmca.com/FAQ/What-is-a-DMCA-Takedown to help. Rings a bell to some hijacking I've read about which ties in with the domain privacy settings for that domain.

Also like Kevin said you can use Google - https://support.google.com/legal/answer/3110420?hl=en-GB

Let me know in a few days if it returns to normal which it should.

[ThompsonPaul]

The only sustainable way to protect a site from this kind of abuse is to implement the X_Origin security headers. These headers control whether any other sites are able to iframe content from your site. This protection should be applied to all sites, IMO.

Assuming your site is running on Apache and allows use of htaccess file, you add this line to your htaccess:

Header append X-FRAME-OPTIONS "SAMEORIGIN"

This determines that only other pages on your own domain can iframe your content. If you want extra protection, you can change "SAMEORIGIN" to "DENY" in which case no iframing at all will be possible. This directive can also be adjusted slightly to run in the httpd.conf file if you have root access and control of your server.

This is vastly better than 403ing offenders after you have (hopefully) detected them, as it's proactive, Miscreants can't iframe you in the first place. Though they can of course still outright scrape the content.

Hope that helps? (and that you get the rankings back after knocking the page content off the scammer's site.)

Paul

[brettmandoes]

We're dealing with a similar issue here. Someone from Russia scraped our content and knocked us out of the SERP. Google sees a 200 status code but all others see 404.

We sent in a DMCA takedown request via https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard and it was responded to in less than a week (4 days). One caveat - make sure you have copyright ownership on that material. If you are an agency representing a client you may not have copyright and you may need to have them submit the request.

When you submit the request to Google and they verify it's legitimate they will remove the offending site from their search results. This is the only way to begin restoring your position.

You can contact their hosting provider and submit a takedown request with them as well. Provide evidence, and threaten legal action if they do not respond. Of course, Google has still indexed the other website, so you still need to submit a DMCA request with them to get your rankings back.

May the odds be ever in your favor.

[JamesPenn]

@Kevin - Thanks. Is that this tool? https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard

@Greg - Thanks for the tip. As yet, no changes in ranking with only the 403 error.

@Paul - Thanks - my host have since implemented that line of code to prevent further problems.

@Brett - Thanks. I will do that and hopefully rankings will come back.

[JamesPenn]

Just to give an update on the situation.

I submitted a DMCA request here. As yet (5 days later) it has not been responded to but the offending domain has been offline for 3-4 days. Not sure who took it offline.

Still Google is ranking the offending domain instead of mine. In fact if you search for my exact URL (http://www.naturallivingideas.com/drinking-apple-cider-vinegar-benefits/) in Google, it still brings up the offending domain.

How long does it take for a site to be removed from the index once it goes offline?

James

[brettmandoes]

There is no hard and fast answer to this. I've seen a DMCA request with Google take over a year to respond to, and I've seen it take a couple of months. Treat it as a marathon instead of a sprint. If you're lucky you'll be one of the ones whose case is examined and quickly rectified but expect this to take awhile.