Copycat websites

[RikkiD22]

Hello,

Do you know if there is anything you can do against a copycat website?

By copycat I mean a website which uses our brand / domain name to steal our brand traffic.

The reason I ask is a new site recently launched with which is optimised to take some of our brand traffic:

Site tile - www.my<ourbrandname>.co.uk</ourbrandname>

Description - For when I need <ourbrandname></ourbrandname>

They gave no physical address or email addresses to funnel customers through an enquiry form which got me suspesious so when I checked the IP address in the MOZ Toolbar and did a WhoIs check on the IP address it brought up one of our main competitors websites.

Anyone got an experiences of this and know what can be done?

[Theo-NL]

I think the first thing to do is contact your competitor (if you're certain is it they who are behind this) and ask them in a kind and open email to remove this kind of aggressive advertising. If they are unwilling to comply with this request, you might want to consider legal steps against them.

[RikkiD22]

Just did another whois from a different site using the domain name and the Registrant field states our competitors company name.

Guess we will have to call them and see what their reasoning is.

[CPU]

I'd kindly ask them to remove it with the veiled threat of legal action.

If they decline then I would approach their webhosts, which can often be worked out from the Whois record, and ask them to remove the offending site giving them the full details.

If none of that works then perhaps you could go blackhat on them (not that I would condone that)

[Tompt]

We're in the UK and took down a guy that was sitting on one of our domains (the then system admin had let it lapse) . It was incredibly costly (much more than just buying the domain from them was (but by that point he'd put the directors back up)). Ours was a different situation though, he was just squatting sending traffic to competitors, he wasn't a direct competitor.

Since we're discussing a .co.uk domain you can go to nominet and go through their dispute resolution service.

http://www.nominet.org.uk/disputes/

With this potentially useful section of the faq

http://www.nominet.org.uk/disputes/drs/faq/#rightstest

I can't offer you too much hope though, any legal stuff is always costly and often not worth the cost.

[RikkiD22]

Thanks Tompt, ill check out those links to see what can be done but like you say I guessed the legal route would likely be costly although we may have to do it if he starts climbing up the rankings quickly.

Lewis-SEO contacting the webhost is a good idea, I have got their details and may give it a go.

As a quick update since posting originally our MD spoke to their owner who said he will consider taking it down on the threat of us doing the same to them (as we have more resources and with them having a unique, none keyword, name I guess that isnt a route they would choose) <seo wars="">:)</seo>

[Tompt]

I should have said that Lewis-SEO offered some really good advice, mine was more a fallback (maybe a little bit before the blackhat option.  ) if that failed.

Yeah you could always reciprocate, then offer a ceasefire when things started to get daft.

Purely by chance (and I really don't put this forward as a serious option) this appeared on hacker news a few minutes ago and I thought it was quite a coincidence.

http://liveatthewitchtrials.blogspot.com/2011/03/search-engine-deoptimization.html

[RikkiD22]

If they refuse to take it down we would adopt Lewis-SEO idea first, seems like the easiest and quickest route.

It's a shame situations like this arise really and there is no official way to deal with it. We wouldn't really go down the blackhat route but it is a good stick to use as an for them to stop.

That was an interesting read on the link (why would anyone refuse links in their T&Cs!?)

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Opt,

I'm going through old questions that are still unanswered in Q&A. Do you have an update for us of how this turned out? Anything that can be helpful to other people in the same situation? I'm curious to know what happened.

Thanks!