Should I be concerned that somebody else's domain is pointing to mine?

Question

So the person who owns say, foofakedomain.com, appears to be forwarding with masking his domain to my domain foorealdomain.com.

Should I be concerned about this for some reason? If so, why?

What can I do about it, if I need to?

Answer 1

Assuming he's using an iframe which contains your actual website, you can simply break it by entering this javascript code into your pages:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function() {
if (top.location != location) {
top.location.href = document.location.href ;
}
}

</script>

This should redirect the end-user to the actual page with no hidden frame.

The only reason why you should be worried is if he's trying to phish for user information with this technique, as I don't see any other use for what he's doing.

Answer 2

I have/had the same issue. Just came up recently. I have what appears to be two domains "p/blz.io" pointing to my website. No idea why. Can't find them on whois lookup. They're in Chicago I know. Contacted their server host who won't help at all. I found this "solution" on line. To add this javascript to the homepage.

if (location.href != "http://yourdomain.com/") { location.href = "http://yourdomain.com/" }

I did and it works. It does redirect right to my site URL. Before our site came up with their URL, something like user.orignal.ourdomainname.com/p.blz.io . We use the Alexa traffic bar and our site was around 200K and when it pulled up on their URL it was near 4,000,000 rank. I hope this helps. But also want to know if this is actually a fix, or am I hurting myself here somehow? It redirects my own search results that have the index.html extension to the mydomain.com URL. So I don't know if I should have just left it alone or did this.

Answer 3

Yeah you should, if you are interested in saving bandwidth. Take a look at his WHOIS to see who it is, and maybe inform the DNS host. It could be a mistake on his part as well ;)

Answer 4

Yes, that's rarely an acceptable situation. Only time is when there's consent. You can:

1. Contact the owner and request that they stop
2. If you have access to the server/routers you can set up filters to block the traffic.
3. If you don't have access then you can work with your ISP to block.

Items 2 and 3 can get to be a pain quick, though.

Answer 5

I think you should be super-concerned because it is a trivial way to lower someone's ranking into Google.

Google considers every site with different names but pointing to the same content to be duplicated content and shall penalize your legitimate site's ranking accordingly.

Which is why it is recommend to:

1. permanent redirect (301) www.domain.com to domain.com (it's not your issue here, but it's the same 'duplicated content' SNAFU)

2. use something (like Apache *mod_rewrite*) to permanently redirect (301) any single query pointing to your IP that is not asking for domain.com to domain.com.

It's explained here and it's ugly:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=41bddf76008473e1&hl=en