I fell victim to an interesting blackhat SEO technique that I just discovered today. Someone has pointed another domain name at one of my sites. Go to their domain, you see my site, just the same as if you typed in the correct domain name. They have not cracked the site, they have no access to the files or databases. So why? What do they benefit?

Well, I assume it works like this. Suppose mysite.com is a long established, PR5 site with great content. Blackhat points hissite.com at the same DNS numbers, using a different domain name server. Voíla, Blackhat now has great content on hissite.com, and soon is ranked pr5 too. Now, according to all the duplicate content information we read, this is not supposed to happen. His duplicate site should be penalized — but in the real case of my site being used, the home page has the same rank as the original site. Sub-pages are not ranked at all, and only about 25% of the pages are in the Google index, while all of the original site pages have been indexed and have rank. The rank is based on content alone, the site has only one incoming link shown in Yahoo, and that is disguised as an offer to sell the site — oops! ’sold’ already, surprise, surprise. Google shows two links to the site, neither with any page rank.

I’m assuming it takes a while before any penalty for pointing two domains at one site kicks-in, no doubt to allow for site transfers to be completed without penalties. Now, so long as Blackhat points the site to his own DNS before Google discovers the site is a duplicate, he will have (for a while) instant pr5 on a new site. I’m guessing that is the goal, since I don’t have any real competition for the subject covered by that site. If it were a competitive subject, another possibility might be that Blackhat just wants to get my site penalized by the search engines to lower its trust ranking.

Hopefully, we will never know for sure because the site will go away. I contacted the domain registrar and owner of the DNS server, and hope they will act on my complaint. If not, I will have to contact Google in writing to make a copyright complaint (they don’t accept those by email), which takes too long but is the only other solution that comes to mind.

This kind of minor hassle is part of the downside of having your own Web Empire. There are several others, like spam, hosting service problems, etc., but they are all part of doing business on the Internet.