question How to fight against blackhat SEO guys doing "website restoration"

[Zsolt Bikadi]

We've lost a charity business domain (our fault, forgot to renew), that's happening. To our bad luck, it was re-registered by some seo guy, who "restored" the website from wayback and added some links to the restored site.

So the big issue is that this is our charity, these are our photos, our content, our addresses, our contacts, our design etc., it is very painful that our partners think that it is a living site and submit forms, sends emails etc which are obviously not sent to us. And there are many legal aspects of course.

What we tried:
- contacting the registrant (behind privacy protection): no response
- contacting the registrar, internet . bs: they don't care
- contacting the hosting: they don't care

Do you have any idea what we can do to at least turn off the impersonating website? (Of course getting back the domain would be the best but we have no trademark, it is just the name of our charity).

 

[twiki]

File for an UDRP ASAP.

Should you lose that, get a lawyer and seek resolution in a court of law. (So start with a lawyer regardless)

It depends. To be honest I'd already have started both if I was in this situation, for: 1) recovering the domain, and 2) seeking compensation for harm done to the charity via what they do.

Not to mention, the blackhat stuff is likely to penalize your site in the medium term. They typically burn such sites then get others.

 

[Gabriel360]

Talk to @jberryhill, he's a great IP Lawyer.

 

[Jannes]

Contact CentralNic who owns internet.bs. They seem to care what people think of their brands:

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/internet.bs

 

[jberryhill]

but we have no trademark

Simply because you have not registered a trademark does not mean you do not have a trademark.

If you have been conducting a charitable business using a name that distinctively identifies you from other such businesses, then you may have common law trademark rights, which meets the requirements of the UDRP:

https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/overview3.0/#item11

1. First UDRP Element

1.1 What type of trademark rights are encompassed by the expression “trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights” in UDRP paragraph 4(a)(i)?

1.1.1 The term “trademark or service mark” as used in UDRP paragraph 4(a)(i) encompasses both registered and unregistered (sometimes referred to as common law) marks.

...

1.3 What does a complainant need to show to successfully assert unregistered or common law trademark rights?

To establish unregistered or common law trademark rights for purposes of the UDRP, the complainant must show that its mark has become a distinctive identifier which consumers associate with the complainant’s goods and/or services.

Relevant evidence demonstrating such acquired distinctiveness (also referred to as secondary meaning) includes a range of factors such as (i) the duration and nature of use of the mark, (ii) the amount of sales under the mark, (iii) the nature and extent of advertising using the mark, (iv) the degree of actual public (e.g., consumer, industry, media) recognition, and (v) consumer surveys.

------------------

Confusing "having a trademark" with "having a registered trademark" is probably the biggest single misunderstanding about trademarks in general.

Here's a case I just concluded on behalf of a client who does not have a registered trademark:

https://www.adrforum.com/DomainDecisions/2052293.htm

I've also dealt with situations where a domain name was taken over for SEO purposes:

https://www.adrforum.com/DomainDecisions/1843527.htm

You'll notice there was no registered trademark in that one either.

 

[twiki]

Simply because you have not registered a trademark does not mean you do not have a trademark.

Excellent point! Many businesses simply do not know this.

( I came to say the same originally but for some reason I forgot )

OP, great advice here.

 

[john888]

Contact your partners to take down their links to your old website URL. They probably have a catch all so are collecting all your email, so contact all your clients to use your new email address. You can check this out "When you file a change of address request using Search Console, it tells Google to emphasize crawling and indexing your new site over crawling your old site".

 

[bhartzer]

I literally have recovered a domain name for a client who had this exact thing happen to them.

First step would be to contact the web host and file a DMCA, they should then take down the content. Then you would need to file a UDRP.

If you send me a message or contact me directly I can give you a copy of the UDRP filing that your domain attorney could review to file a similar UDRP against the name.

 

[Zsolt Bikadi]

Thank you, everyone, for the incredibly helpful suggestions. I will begin by trying the tips that does not cost too much. If these do not yield the desired results, I am prepared to explore more expensive alternatives, which appear to be the ultimate solution. I will update the thread if something noteworthy happened.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Have you tried contacting the registrar compliance department or the web provider they are using and point out that the owner is impersonating your organization, and ask them to take action to take down the site?

As others have pointed out there are other avenues, should the registrar and host provider not be willing to take action.

I can only imagine how stressful this is, and hope that you are successful in rapidly getting action taken by one route of the other.

-Bob

Edit: I just see that @bhartzer has already suggested this, and kindly offered to help.

 

[Zsolt Bikadi]

Happy end.

I got no response from the "wayback restorator", nor the registrar. It was hosted on Amazon cloud, they started communicating, asking for proofs, etc. But suddenly the domain got listed on GoDaddy for $250. I bought it right away and everything is back to normal.

The bad thing is that no lesson learned by the SEO guy (or oppositely, he got another proof that doing this is profitable).

Thank you all for the helpful suggestions and support!

 

[poweredbyme]

Nobody has mentioned about wayback machine.
Wayback machine is theft.
They are the biggest source of copyrighted materials.
It's very difficult to remove your content from wayback machine. If you contact them to request removal they act as if they are the content owner.
Wayback machine is providing a totally illegal service and has to be shut down.

 

[Hypersot]

@poweredbyme,
afaik, there is a way for a website to not get crawled by them just like any other crawlers out there.

Not tech savvy with setting up websites but I remember I did that in the past on a page where I had my domains for sale with the prices (didn't like the fact that someone could see past pricing so I blocked wayback)

 

[poweredbyme]

@poweredbyme,
afaik, there is a way for a website to not get crawled by them just like any other crawlers out there.

Not tech savvy with setting up websites but I remember I did that in the past on a page where I had my domains for sale with the prices (didn't like the fact that someone could see past pricing so I blocked wayback)

I am webmaster for 20 years.

In the past, it was easy to block their bot by adding their bot to your robots.txt.
But some years ago they announced they will stop obeying robots.txt even if their bot is dissallowed.
I remember in their explanation they were saying robots.txt is for search engines but wayback machine is not and robots.txt is an old tech which doesn't fit today's needs.

I had to search the ways how to block wayback machine bots. I blocked their ip blocks. But I don't know if they have different ip blocks.

here is my code in my htaccess file to block their ip block:

<RequireAny>
Require all granted
Require not ip 207.241.224.0/20 208.70.24.0/21
</RequireAny>

I don't know if these ip blocks are up to date. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Wayback machine is a devil service.

 

[Hypersot]

@poweredbyme,
ouch, that's definitely not good. Thanks for the heads-up.

 

[poweredbyme]

@poweredbyme,
ouch, that's definitely not good. Thanks for the heads-up.

Yeah not good. If one develops a similar service like wayback machine, would be arrested for theft and the service would be shut down.

Wayback machine crawls your own content without permission and it's almost impossible to stop that. They refuse to remove your own content from their website when you request , or worse, they don't reply.

 

[bhartzer]

Nobody has mentioned about wayback machine.
Wayback machine is theft.
They are the biggest source of copyrighted materials.
It's very difficult to remove your content from wayback machine. If you contact them to request removal they act as if they are the content owner.
Wayback machine is providing a totally illegal service and has to be shut down.

It's NOT difficult at all to remove your content from wayback machine, I've done it plenty of times. You just have to ask them to remove it and stop crawling your domain. It's actually a pretty simple process.

 

[bhartzer]

I am webmaster for 20 years.

In the past, it was easy to block their bot by adding their bot to your robots.txt.
But some years ago they announced they will stop obeying robots.txt even if their bot is dissallowed.
I remember in their explanation they were saying robots.txt is for search engines but wayback machine is not and robots.txt is an old tech which doesn't fit today's needs.

I had to search the ways how to block wayback machine bots. I blocked their ip blocks. But I don't know if they have different ip blocks.

here is my code in my htaccess file to block their ip block:

<RequireAny>
Require all granted
Require not ip 207.241.224.0/20 208.70.24.0/21
</RequireAny>

I don't know if these ip blocks are up to date. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Wayback machine is a devil service.

So, wayback machine no longer honors the robots.txt file (like a lot of search engines and bots out there). Google, for example, still crawls and indexes pages--and pages can still rank even though it's blocked in robots.txt.

There is a different process now to get your pages removed and to stop them from crawling your domain.