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Today I noticed several domains are using masking to associate their domain name with my content. E.g. “draughtmark.co.uk” and “recycleofficewaste.co.uk” (plus several others). Can I prevent this and bots from indexing my content under those domains (otherwise my site will get penalised)?

I have since put in some Javascript and a PHP function to detect and redirect to my site. This seems to prevent people from unknowingly browsing my content on another domain, but I don't know if this will help in regards to the bots as it either requires the Referrer to be set or the Javascript file to be loaded.

2 Answers2

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Use canonical URLs in your HTML to that no matter what domain it is served under your pages are given proper credit as being the original. Although originally designed to deal with duplicate content on a website, it was changed to work across domains for republished works.

John Conde
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  • +1, this is the most important quick fix (but this should be fixed at the root also) – Pekka Jan 31 '14 at 21:46
  • Trying to solve my problem I changed all my links to absolute URLs, but this had no affect - they were all renamed on the masked site. Won't it be a similar issue with canonical URLs - i.e. they will be on the masked site too? –  Jan 31 '14 at 21:54
  • If they are changing the HTML on the fly then this will not work. If you are using dynamic code which is checking for the domain name being used to access the site then it would use their domain and not yours, too. But if you hard code the domain name in (or otherwise do not dynamically set it) you should be ok. – John Conde Jan 31 '14 at 21:56
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It seems the owner of the domain draughtmark.co.uk has configured its DNS record to resolve to the IP 82.147.22.194.

This is the same IP as passionateabout.me so it's your server IP, correct?

In that case, your problem is a misconfigured server. Your web server apparently serves your web site no matter what domain name the user is requesting.

That's too liberal a setting, and can be fixed by defining a specific VirtualHost containing only the domains you wish your web site to be served under.

Pekka
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  • Well I don't configure the server as it's a hosted site. I did buy a dedicated IP yesterday though so could it be my host has messed up and the other sites are redirecting to mine? –  Jan 31 '14 at 21:55
  • @Carl it could be some sort of inadvertent mixup, yes. The server should not be accepting domain names other than those that are intended for serving the site – Pekka Jan 31 '14 at 21:56
  • looks like it is a problem on the server. My host said "Right - it looks like legacy DNS from non-active accounts but where the domains are still pointed at our nameservers." –  Jan 31 '14 at 22:50