You can see the extent of the damage by doing a search on Google for “4some girls” with quotes. You’ll see website after website with a nonsense subdirectory name, such as “jqywy” with hundreds of spammy pages under it, all on reputable websites. See the screenshots below.

If you look at the homepage of the sites listed in the screenshots above, you can see that they are all legitimate businesses. However, they all have a subdirectory dealing with 4some girls, 4some lesbians, etc.

Looking further, all of these websites use as nameservers ns1.securehostserver.com and ns2.securehostserver.com, which appear to be owned by iPowerweb.

It’s not clear at this point how these directories got there – whether this is a result of a massive hack of iPowerweb’s accounts, or whether this was placed there directly by iPowerweb.

A few months ago, I started a new, content-rich website. It included about 100 articles. Like I often do with a new website, I got a few backlinks to the site, then left it to age a few months before seriously promoting it.

Today I returned to that website to find it had some serious ranking and indexing problems in Google. I tried to figure out what was going on and found that someone had used a very creative way of sabotaging the website.

What this person had done was take almost every single article from my website, and submitted them to many article directories. However, the articles were submitted with his byline and with a link to his websites! Since then, many other websites had syndicated these articles from the article banks – and all of these syndicated articles were linking to his websites.

Now, it looks to Google like my website is simply a copy of free articles available in article directories, with little original content. In short – little original content = not worth indexing or ranking. What’s more, this person’s website is getting credit for all of these articles, as most of the copies on the web are linking to his website.

Normally, I don’t care much if someone copies from my websites. I think Google is pretty smart about it, and as long as your content is cached first, you should be alright most of the time. However, in this case, with so many copies of most of the articles from my website, and all of them attributing authorship to someone else, it’s a big problem. It’s an even bigger problem for brand new websites (like mine) as these sites will not yet have earned much trust or authority in Google.

I can’t think of what I can do about this other than start from scratch, which is very disheartening (and expensive). If anyone has any thoughts about how to deal with this, I’d appreciate the input. And of course, in the future, I will be more vigilant about checking for people copying my websites.

Thousands of customers have bought domains from us, partly because of our 7-Part Guarantee

When you register a domain with us, we promise you’ll receive…

1. The Highest Auth Code Security. We take security seriously. So seriously in fact, that we will make sure that you simply cannot obtain the auth codes for your domains. That way you can rest assured that your domain will never be transferred away. And if for some reason you actually do receive an auth code, we guarantee it will be wrong, adding a further level of security against domain transfers.

2. Customer Service. We guarantee that if you telephone us, you will never be on hold longer than 3 hours. That is, if the line doesn’t cut off suddenly before then. We also guarantee that the person you speak with will have studied English for at least one month and know what a domain is. And we promise to answer all emails we receive (unfortunately many seem to get lost) within at most one week.

3. Security Holds. If you even just correct a typo in your address, we will lock your domain for 60 days. It may be against ICANN rules to do this, but did you know that small whois changes are exactly how hackers go about stealing domains?

4. Land Rush Charges. If you are ordering a land rush domain, we guarantee we will charge you for placing the order – then not do anything to try to get the domain. Oh, and there are no refunds.

5. Guaranteed Renewals. You may have transferred all your domains away from us, but you can be sure that we will continue to charge your credit card for renewing your domains.

6. Full Support If Your Domain Is Stolen. We know that having your domain stolen is one of the most stressful and unpleasant things that can happen. Therefore, if your domain is stolen, we guarantee that we will provide you with a link to ICANN’s UDRP information. And, really, that’s about all we’ll do.

7. Intellectual Property Protection. We know how hard it is to come up with a great idea for a domain nowadays. So, if you find a great domain that hasn’t been registered, and decide not to register it right away, you can rest assured that we will register it so that no one else can. It’s just one of those things we do because we care. Oh, and because then you’ve got to come back to us to register it and pay our extortionate rates.

Disclaimer: if you haven’t guessed by now, this is just a humorous post. Enjoy your weekend.

Most registrar’s publicly state that they do not front run. However, Network Solutions really doesn’t care, and is now front running all domains that are queried on their website.

I gave it a try myself and looked up the domain name IAmADellCybersquatter.com at Network Solutions. Sure enough this was available. I then went to register it at Moniker, and was told that it was not available. I looked up the whois and the registrant is “This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com.”

So, there you have it – Network Solutions admitting to being a Dell cybersquatter.

In short, avoid Network Solutions like the plague. They have always been one of the most expensive in the industry, and now they are domain front running.