If you have a trademark, domain takedown always works.
Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
11–20 of 310 posts
Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
#12Add a link rel="canonical" to your pages as well, it should give engines a hint that your domain is the legit one.
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56326/canonic...
I noticed that the other domain is hotlinking your images. So you can disable image hotlinking, by only allowing certain domains as the referers. If you block hotlinked images then the other domain will not look as good. Remember to do it for SVGs too.
https://ubiq.co/tech-blog/prevent-image-hotlinking-nginx/
Finally I also see they are using a CDN called Statically to host some assets off your domain. You can block their scrapers by user agent listed here:
Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
#13If the host (DediPath) is not respecting DMCA notices, one other thing you can do is adding the requester's IP address to every page, eg as a div class. If the responses are live proxied, this will surface the cloner's front-facing IP address, and you can block that (and their ASN) specifically.
Oh, I like this idea. Would be pretty easy to automate it by setting up some script scraping the IP revealed on their site, adding it to the block list as they rotate around. Clever.
Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
#14If you have a trademark, domain takedown always works.
That isn't neccesary true. While I definitely agree that the OP should pursue that path, many providers are in other jurisdictions.
Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
#15Add a link rel="canonical" to your pages as well, it should give engines a hint that your domain is the legit one. https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56326/canonic... I noticed that the other domain is hotlinking your images. So you can disable image hotlinking, by only allowing certain domains as the referers. If you block hotlinked images then the other domain will not look as good. Remember to do it fo…
I think they are replacing all mentions of saashub.com with their domain. Also, I'm not using statically.io, that's something they are prepending in front of all images. Automatically.
Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
#16Maybe some logic honeypot would be good, such as a infinite content paging list with some random trigger hidden at pages with non-sense titles. When one IP hits these triggers, it is automatically banned. Bots will trigger it by walking through all pages, but real human would not click in since the paging is non-sense and titles are non-sense.
Yeah, but I don't want to ban bots. Also, they are not actively crawling anything, but rather mirroring the content on demand. At least that's my observation so far... thanks anyways.
Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
#17Another option would be to use a service like Cloudflare, which offers protections against scraping and other malicious behavior. This can help prevent the proxy-mirror site from being able to access your site's content. https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-scrapeshield-discove...
I have Cloudflare at the front already. The issue is that they are not actively scraping the content but rather mirroring it on demand.
If you're on Cloudflare and they're stripping JS wouldn't a JS challenge be appropriate?
https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/get-started/c...
Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
#18Add a link rel="canonical" to your pages as well, it should give engines a hint that your domain is the legit one. https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56326/canonic... I noticed that the other domain is hotlinking your images. So you can disable image hotlinking, by only allowing certain domains as the referers. If you block hotlinked images then the other domain will not look as good. Remember to do it fo…
I think they are replacing all mentions of saashub.com with their domain. Also, I'm not using statically.io, that's something they are prepending in front of all images. Automatically.
But Statically isn't forwarding the User-Agent of the visitor, and they publish the list of User-Agents that they use, which you can block.
Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
#19[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
#20If the host (DediPath) is not respecting DMCA notices, one other thing you can do is adding the requester's IP address to every page, eg as a div class. If the responses are live proxied, this will surface the cloner's front-facing IP address, and you can block that (and their ASN) specifically.
To extend on this, I wouldn't use clear text for this. Create a HMAC of the IP and add it somewhere in the page, makes it harder to realize what's happening and for the adversary to work around it.