What to do when someone copies your top ranking website content (and domain name)?

Hhhm... a new issue that raised it's ugly head today... I have discovered that someone has taken by top ranking .co.uk domain name and registered a .com version, which in itself is fine. It's a UK site and the .co.uk is the one to have as far as I am concerned, but not only have the copied the domain name, they've also lifted large chunks of the website.... the main pages are essentially the same with badly designed headers, and different link urls & phone numbers. Oh, and did I say badly designed?

This has been done to 2 geographically relevant sites and we have had complaints from unhappy customers who think they're dealing with us. The strange thing is that most of the content is lists of specialist equipment that we have for rental, and that the imitator can't have most of it available (it's a small market and we know who has what) so it's been done purely as these sites were high ranking, possibly to support some other business.

So what to do? Well at 5.30pm on a Friday the options were a little limited but I will be detailing what I do and how I get on in this blog.

Some people say call - discuss, but as this is a clear cut case of trading on our reputation it's not the first thing I've done. My first course of action was to a run a whois check, plus basic DNS record checking. The registrant is based in Glasgow and is listed as having about 538 domains. I found the  Registration Service Provider: and requested that they remove the offending material (in this case it's a UK based company that I am a customer of anyway so hopefully that will help - request logged through their support channels)... I also submitted a Spam notification via Google Sitemaps explaining the situation. Both original domains have longstanding sitemaps associated. On Monday, I intend to call the numbers listed and ask them to remove the content. If that fails I'll be contacting trading standards and considering legal action. There are a number of websites that offer advice on such issues, but I haven't had time to investigate more fully yet. I shall post further updates and developments as they occur. It's probably a good time to remind you to ensure that your websites and content have appropriate copyright notices on display in case this happens to you!
UPDATE: I've had a response from his host (UK2) who have a logged a ticket and given him 1 week to respond (They didn't say that would take action as of yet). UK trading standards don't think they can act and have suggested a solicitor. Still waiting for a response from google. Next step is probably to discuss legal action (possibly via FSB or Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce for an initial consultation at least).
LATEST UPDATE: I contacted UK2 again today and they reported that the owner of the copycat site had not responded with the time limit set. They then reported that he had just submitted a long and rambling reply which would need careful consideration. The UK2 operator also apologised and said that the copy sites should have been suspended which they did do within 30 minutes - currently they are showing a 403 error. I've been advised to wait for a response to my support ticket. We have also looked into legal action at this point and as things stand we have been advised that we stand a good chance of proving that the copycat site is guilty of passing off. It will cost money though so I'm hoping that UK2 will persuade the ripoff merchant to create some of his own content at least. I have heard nothing back via google sitemaps as of yet. UPDATE 27/02/2010 Both offending sites are back up, but with our content removed (as far as I can tell). They are now 1 page sites (although there may be orphan pages on the site still accessible via google and other search engines. The page layout is still mine, and the domain name is still a copycat but I guess I can't expect anything more at the moment.

Launching a New E-Commerce site from Scratch

This week has seen me rollout a newly designed e-commerce website (www.london-projectors.co.uk), aimed at the world of audiovisual equipment - specifically projector hire & sales, replacement lamps and ceiling mounting brackets. The site is targetted at the London geographic area and has around 6000 pages which I will be attempt to drive some traffic to over the coming months. The site uses google checkout and the google checkout cart and is built in php and mysql - mostly by hand over the course of the last week. I intend to investigate google base and the effect that this has on traffic, google sitemaps (submission today), plus every other technique I can find to launch on the world.... watch this blog for regular updates.

Three Useful Utility Programs - All Free

ImgBurn - It describes itself as the ultimate image burner program and I've found it great so far. It's small and easy to use and will burn .iso & .img files without renaming. It will also create image files and can be used to check your finalised CDs & DVDs for errors (some drives perform better than others). It will also burn Blu-Ray discs.

Download it here.
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Bulk Rename Utility - Another really useful program, again free (donations accepted). It's a huge timesaver when it comes to renaming files (eg. batch renaming your newly downloaded photographs). It's fully configurable and can remove names, prefixes, suffixes and add them all back in again.

Download the free bulk rename utility here.
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RarZilla Free Unrar - You may well have come across .rar files (.rar is a file extension used to reduce filesize, similar to zipping / unzipping but on a GNU licence) and wondered what to do with them - windows has not built-in solutions (as far as I know). Well, here's the answer - just drop it into this piece of freeware to decompress the files and get on with the business in hand.

Download free rar decompression utility here.