How should I block unwanted domain names? [duplicate]

Question

I have noticed that someone pointed his domain to my dedicated IP address and now my website can be viewed using his domain name @ example.com . This can hurt my SE Traffic and SEO in many ways. How can I block this domain?

Answer 1

To prevent a negative impact on your SEO you can redirect any incoming content that isn't for your own domain to google to prevent the impression of duplicate content. How this can be done relies on your webserver.

// You can limit the answers of your webserver to a specific domain. It is explained here. You can modify the catchall entry with a redirection like explained here.

To solve this at long sight you should send an abuse Report to the responsibel Registration authority which registered the fake domain(s).

You can also check legal measures if the registrator was that dumb to use his real name.

Answer 2

1. Report this to the registrar
2. Report this to the DNS service they are using
3. Redirect all incoming requests from that domain name to a page or another website.

It sounds like you've done 1. Action 2 may result in a better response - technically the registrar can do little. You'll want to read the terms of service for both 1 and 2, and find out if there's anything specific that they are doing to violate the ToS. Point this out, but be brief and to the point, "Your client, the owner of domain example.com, is using DNS to direct traffic to my web server in violation of your terms of service, section 3.2 'You must not use this service to attack any website or internet service or user directly or indirectly'. Please consider disabling their account until they are in compliance with your Terms of Service."

For action 3 the specific implementation depends on your server. When a web client requests your site's homepage, it reports the domain name it intended to contact to your server.

In general, there are two methods to handle this:

• Your server may be able to be configured to reject or redirect requests for domain names. If you're using an Apache server, you'll need to edit htaccess, if IIS, you'll need to edit web.config. For other server types, try an internet search for "domain redirect [myservertype] rule".
• Your scripting language running on the server can also perform this redirect. The server passes variables to the script, and these can be accessed in PHP, Perl, CGI, and even javascript. Testing against your domain name and redirecting all others shouldn't require much code.