Andy D Day

I came across something weird today that might interest other online publishers. I got my regular Google alert via email about one of my sites Entertainmentwise.com, (you may be signed up for these yourself, you basically get a daily round up of any new mentions on the net that the Google Bot comes across) one of the links at the bottom of the email listed under Google Web Alert was for a page that looked like a normal Entertainmentwise page. I clicked the link thinking it would take me to my site… and it did. So I logged in and approved some comments pending, when I realised that the domain I was actually on was entertainmentsgossip.com. Thinking I was losing it I backtracked and sure enough the whole site was on this domain. How the hell did that happen?

I followed up with a quick who.is, the domain is registered to www.moniker.com a domain name registering service. Either the actual owners of this domain are hiding behind Moniker Privacy Services or Moniker have registered this domain and this is their standard practice making them a very dubious organisation indeed. Sure enough the IP address on the who is is our server. So WTF is going on here?

I’m guessing that this domain bought very recently is being pointed at our site so that they get a traffic ranking from the content we have. We rank highly on loads of celebrity search terms which would be invaluable to anyone trying to either sell on the domain or start their own celebrity site with some traffic already coming in.

Unfortunately for Entertainmentwise this would almost surely result in some kind of penalisation for our content being duplicated on another domain. So… what to do?

Fortunately there’s an easy fix for this as it only takes a quick rewrite rule in our httpd.ini file (I know, we’re on Windows!) to permanently redirect from their domain to ours, meaning they won’t earn any Google juice from this scam!

This has really got me thinking as to how common this kind of Sitejacking is. I haven’t come across this before, although I’ll be reading my Google Alerts more thoroughly from now on and a few searches with terms I would have thought would fit this kinda scam haven’t turned up a result that looks like what has happened here. So I’m naming the phenomena Sitejacking and I’d be interested to hear from anyone this might have happened to or who knows how common it is.

BTW, for anyone who eventually gets here by Googling this and is looking for a solution, this is my fix, it will be slightly different on a Linux box:

RewriteCond Host: ^www.entertainmentsgossip.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.entertainmentwise\.com$1 [I,RP]

RewriteCond Host: ^entertainmentsgossip.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.entertainmentwise\.com$1 [I,RP]