Scraped site, hijacked searches for business name.

[tntdental]

Hello, I have a site that was scraped (possibly by a competitor's seo company), who then built links to the duplicate site. When people do a search for the name of the business the scraped site is all that comes up along with the usual third-party sites. They seem to take the site down and put it back up every couple of weeks to maintain the rankings in Google. Has anyone ever dealt with something like this? Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated.

Search: LIC Dental Associates

Scraped site: old-farmshow.net

Legit site: licdentalassociates.com

Thanks,

Emery

[EGOL]

If I owned copyright to the pages that they have scraped, I would use my Google DMCA Dashboard to file DMCA complaints against all of the pages on their site where my content is being used in violation of copyright.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard

If you are not familiar with DMCA it would be good to review your plans with an attorney before taking action.  After consulting with an attorney we started filing DMCAs at scale against people who were using our content.  The results have been positive.

If they are using Adsense, I would file complaints there too, and possibly with their hosting.

[tntdental]

Thanks for the response. Our DCMA request is currently under review, I have also submitted complaints to the domain registrar along with submitting the SERP for removal through GSC since the site is currently down. So far everything is pending/under review and it's all moving at a snails pace...

[EGOL]

Nice work!   Hope it kills those weasels.

[MarieHaynes]

Looks like you succeeded! I'm seeing a 404 error when I click on the old-farmshow site.

[tntdental]

No, it has been a 404 whoever did this puts the site back up every couple of weeks and the rest of the time it's a 404. That's been the main frustration with this whole thing.

[MarieHaynes]

Weird.

I would think that if most times when Google visits this page they get a 404 error they would eventually drop it from the index.

Hopefully the DMCA will be successful.

In the meantime, have you tried rewriting the content on your home page? It may be that Google thinks your page is a canonical of the old-farmshow site and is treating it as an inferior site.

Usually Google is pretty good at figuring out what your brand name is, but your page only contains the phrase "LIC Dental Associates" in the title tag and then in the footer. I'd suggest adding a paragraph of content at the top of the page that has an H1 tag saying, "LIC Dental Associates" and then a paragraph that explains concisely what you offer. Be sure to put a few keywords in that paragraph, but don't keyword stuff it. Also mention the brand once or twice in the copy of the page as well.

I'd also change up the wording on the rest of the page significantly so that Google doesn't think it's a duplicate of the fake one.

Once you've done that, then I'd fetch and render using Google Search Console and submit the page to the index. I'm betting that will do the trick.

[tntdental]

Thanks Marie, I'll give that a try.

Update: The DMCA was rejected due to the site 404'ing.

[MarieHaynes]

If the site goes live again, take screenshots. It looks like the site is hosted by Continuum Data Centers. (http://www.whoishostingthis.com/?q=old-farmshow.net). You could contact them with the screenshots and an explanation as to what is going on and they may remove the site.

If that doesn't work, I'd probably get an attorney involved.

Good luck!

[EGOL]

This might be a problem.  If you submit a DMCA agaist a page and that DMCA is rejected, Google will often not accept a second attempt.  This seems to be a problem with Google's DMCA system.

Good luck.