Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Stop! Website Thief!

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the break-out-the-striped-jumpsuits dept.

Rick Zeman writes "We've all heard of people grabbing an image from this web site, ideas from that web site, or some content from yet another web site. But what do you do when someone takes your entire web site and hosts it in a foreign country? Silicon.com has an article that tells the tale of two such web sites."

4 of 475 comments (clear)

  1. Things you can do by prostoalex · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are very few people in this world who would maliciously copy the Web site for the purpose of mirroring it out of their own pocket. More often than not, it's the pageviews and ad rotation that they're after.

    Proliferation of Google Ads, and similar offerings from FindWhat and MarketBanker allowed a bunch of content-driven Web sites to exist and make money at the same time. At one of the sites I run the click-through ratio on Google Ads (the site's only means of survival) are at about 0.1-0.2% and thus more traffic and more content means more targetted visitors, more pageviews, and with 0.1-0.2% ratio being (you hope) constant, more money.

    So hit them where it hurts. If they earn money through Google, Findwhat or MarketBanker, contact the ad engines. Most of the time it's abuse of the service agreement and abuse of their advertising system. They send the paychecks, and if they tell the guy to shape up or have the account suspended, actions will be taken.

    Contact their ISP or hoster, regardless of the country. Unless both the hoster and site copier are the same people, you can find reasonable understanding there, with hoster giving then the warning to the copier about possible implications.

    Contact his advertisers. If you see lots of Amazon referral links, contact Amazon Associates support with the problem description. I never heard Amazon actually doing something about it, but the pressure from several points on the copier might enhance your chances of him giving up.

  2. Re:/. the bastards! by jargoone · · Score: 5, Informative
    Someone needs to do a
    man wget
    Pay special attention to the section on the
    -r
    option.
  3. Re:/. the bastards - with apache bench! by nosphalot · · Score: 5, Informative
    I much prefer to use apache benchmark tool for this sort of thing. Not only can you tell it how many times to get a url, you can tell it how many connections to use while doing it.

    Should be installed under your apache bin directory as 'ab'. I recommend the following if you have a decent pipe:

    /usr/local/apache/bin/ab -n 10000 -c 32 -t 10 -k 'http://www.carorcar.com/gifs/race/gp-start-1.jpg'
  4. Then make sure you add -D by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    Add -D carorcar.com to keep hits to the ad page from getting through.