What to do when someone clones your site?

After the fact might be too late for this, but there are defensive programming techniques you can use to make a cloner's job a bit tougher. In some industries, this is more important than others.

> Obfuscate and compress your frontend code - It's harder to clone a big pile of random code that's not pretty.

> Put subtle watermarks in your site images - Makes their job harder and very easy to slip up.

> Use absolute rather than relative links so your own URLs appear everywhere in the site - It's easy for them to slip up and miss one.

> Use some of that obfuscated JS and frontend code to check what URL you're at and consider your options for redirecting, popping up a warning message, or rewriting the URLs in the body - it's a nightmare to try and figure out what a pile of crazy compressed JS actually does.

> Have your site rely on your own API in some fashion - hard for them to clone if they have to rely on you for the data.

> Put some hidden messages in your source code that might slide by a casual cloning job, but might be enough to verify ownership of the original code.

1) Generally ignore, it doesn't matter. If you're prioritizing your customers and they're prioritizing copying you, they'll always be second to you.

2) Despite the above, call them out publicly. A YC company ripped us off blatantly and we decided to call them out. It will hamper their image and make people aware of what they're doing. Evidence: https://twitter.com/Bensign/status/1512110156275986433

Controversial opinion: ignore it and keep building.

This happened to me years ago when a Russian website copied a website I was running. We had an API that helped them get not just the design, but the data.

Google is pretty smart (sometimes) about figuring out content of origin. If you already have an established site with links pointing in your should be fine. If you're new and you're entire business can be copied that quickly, you have likely larger problems than SEO at this point.

If it's hosted in Germany, send the host an Abmahnung by registered mail. It's a cease and desist letter, German style. Copyright law in Germany leaves no doubt about this being very illegal. I'm surprised that they didn't react.

At the same time, file a DMCA notice with search engines. This could get them delisted.

Don't forget to document everything, as you will need it to do the above.

My website (see profile) has a list of English-speaking lawyers in Berlin.

Do you have a valid trademark in the domain registrars/hosting country?

No? Than as annoying as it is there are few options. However, "About Us" pictures of people at your company do have implicit copyright, and image misuse is 100% enforceable with take-down strikes.

Mostly endured the problem by posting our fiscal mistakes like a running joke, and proudly presenting them for others to "clone". Some folks are even brazen enough to try to sell trademarked squatter-domains. The good news is the .com and country suffix usually ranks higher in searches than most domains by default.

The truth is if you can be cloned with ease, than the product likely falls squarely in the low-hanging-fruit category. Thus, as a business model it is unsustainable.

Get a lawyer. If you're not willing to pay for a lawyer, then it doesn't matter, because that's the only way you'd actually enforce anything.

But, if your service can be cloned in a mechanical manner, it's doubtful it's that valuable anyway. And, if there's money to be had, you'll likely see legitimate competitors that make this cloning incident seem like a drop in the bucket.

Definitely file an official DMCA complaint with the hosting provider. They are required to respond. If they don't follow the required DMCA process, the hosting provider may be liable. Though, I have filed many, many DMCA requests and have had a 100% success rate.

You should talk to a lawyer if you want real advice or want to pursue this.

You should also consider the outcome if someone in an unreachable country (eg. Russia) cloned your website. If this is a grave issue, then you need to re-evaluate your business plan.

File a DMCA complaint and move on with your life.

Reference: 24 years in the web hosting industry

There's a few things that can help:

- DMCA takedowns (domain registrar, ISP, IP space owner)

- Report the fake site as phishing in Google Safebrowsing and similar

- If they're hotlinking any assets, replace them with broken / nasty ones

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer

In my opinion you should first get technical people to document as much "discovery" in both technical and simple layman's terms, then get lawyers to review your findings and determine if a legal case and if there are financial or brand damages can be built. They can take it from there.

When this happened to Marie Ng of Llama Life in August, Michele Hansen recorded a video sharing advice on copycats:

https://twitter.com/mjwhansen/status/1562691010538311680

Michele's podcast also did a 2-parter on competitive advantage and moats, which help protect you from copycats:

https://softwaresocial.substack.com/p/talking-competitive-ad...

https://softwaresocial.substack.com/p/competitive-advantage-...

I would ignore and focus on your product. There's not a lot that can be done to prevent this from happening and money, time and resources spent on lawyers with no certain outcome is probably not as beneficial as directing that money, time and resources towards improving your product.

The people who do this tend to be lazy and uninterested in the actual business. (If they had a real passion for it, they wouldn't just clone your public facing website) Thus, they will probably vanish on their own sooner than later anyway.

Do you have people clamoring to pay you for your service? Ignore the clone site, you have found a viable market and need to focus on on boarding customers and not stumbling.

Still have nothing like a lot of people wanting to pay you to use your service? Ignore the clone site, they haven't stolen anything of any value.

It sounds glib, but tons of startups are arguing about roles and responsibilities of employees and their vacation policy while the bank account runs down to 0 and nobody notices because they have no costumers.

And what exactly is a "clone" in this context? Did they merely make a similar site or does it include your IP?

If it's the former then i can't imagine you can do anything about it because they haven't done anything wrong. If it's the latter then you need a lawyer because it's not the host's responsibility to enforce your IP rights, especially since from their perspective you could be a competitor trying to use illegitimate tactics to sabotage their customer.

i start many projects by cloning the site of the closest competitor to what i want to achieve then start swapping out logos and copy and experiment / iterate. Of course that does not mean this will launch until there is a USP and all original code is replaced. Most of these projects look very different by that time or are just learnings that go into the next phase. Are you sure this is not a similar pre launch thing? Its good to have an eye on what links you get in but obsessing over these kind of things can be more hurtful than what you fear. also any reason to not share a link? these things are always super interesting to see. also if someone would contact my hoster without reaching out to me first i would be upset, i hope you tried that first? just one last anecdote: once i discovered the work to replicate the backend was far too high and i could not add enough value to justify a complete new product so i wrote up all my improvements and biz dev results for the company and just sent it to them to use as they wish, they liked it so much they implemented nearly everything. this is probably a rare case but example that not every cloning means evil intent. this is kind of what web development is about.

I think I agree with others here - this isn't a real concern. If the only value you're adding to a market is your site design which anyone can legally view and copy then you aren't adding anything. If your product has true value then that will win out - if others can easily copy and make a better version then that's still better for everyone overall because you're business model isn't as good as theirs

For some types of businesses, this could matter. For B2B SaaS, if you're running your business right it absolutely should not. You should have a sales team generating leads and making sales. As you continue to grow, your reputation in the space will start to bring in more leads.

At the end of the day, they're cloning your website, not your product, and that means they're not going to be taking any business from you.

Make sure your SEO is better, otherwise do business as usual.

Is your business a website, or is your business your excellent customer service and providing a better experience than your competitors?

Considering you've been in business 10 years, it's already the latter. Double down on the best customer experience you can provide. People with money and loyalty aren't going to jump ship because another site has similar look.

Website cloning story: I make websites for small businesses. We had a client go out of business and let their domain expire. Someone re-registered the domain, and put the old website back up. Nothing we can do, no motive detected, the contact form doesn't even work. Why? SEO? Phishing?

Just curious - was this a result of your team ‘building in public’ (i.e., sharing regular updates publicly on Twitter or other communities as you build)?

I’ve seen more and more cases of this happening when founders build in public, especially if they share revenue numbers.

Regardless, sorry to hear about this happening to you…

Focus on your product, there will always be competition and they'll lose interest quicker than you.

If the clone is a copy paste of your frontend code, and you have snapshots to prove it, then you can spend a hundred grand on a lawsuit. It won't matter in the end though. Making tech is easy, the business not so much. Same reason why reddit clones never work out.

Is it possible that the site owner is an inexperienced business person who was conned by a "web designer" and doesn't know that the site was copied? (It doesn't really sound like it but it's a possibility to consider.)

German hosting companies typically respond to DMCA takedown requests even though they probably aren't legally required to. It's an easy/valid thing to do for a scraped site.

Do nothing. This is precisely the intent of an open and free-as-in-freedom web.

If the success of your business depends on the secrecy of your web source code, consider reevaluating your business model.

I solve this by making my site completely uninteresting to search engines. So if my content shows up in google, I know someone's copied it.

(This is actually a joke about how bad I am at SEO.)

Agree with others here. Just ignore. For a bit of fun, change the content of the link the copy cat is using. Maximum fun if the link is a script

In theory isn't this what EV certs are for? I know users don't really notice though.

For context, I’ve mostly worked for smaller SaaS companies that went after “whales” in a specialized vertical and that informs my opinion.

Is your only “unfair advantage” that you hope to rank high in organic search? How do you acquire customers - conferences, targeted ads, a sales team? None of those efforts would be affected by a cloned site.

my company website got cloned twice, we are based in france and it was cloned in india and in thailand...

It was so far away with no impact, that i decided to do nothing.

Are they linking to any images on your site? Ones you can change?

Clone theirs! ... oh wait ...

You have a few options.

Any requests coming from that server network should be goatse-d on all images.

Or, since they're hosting from Germany, make sure to throw in some pro-nazi stuff and "holocaust didnt happen" stuff, and then turn them in to their government.

Basically, you can either just use normal troll defacement, or you can poison them with illegal to their location content. Your choice.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

DMCA?

Controversial opinion: DDOS them

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" ...

Without people blatantly copying stuff, we wouldn't have the iPhone.

If they copied your site and beat you, they deserve to win. Ignore and keep building. Your superior product and eventual superior brand are not cloneable.