Block someone masking their domain to your site

baldidiot · Oct 5, 2016

Not really a domain issue, but there seems to be a greater than average knowledge of coding on this forum so thought it may be a good place to ask.

We're recently launched a new site and found that someone is masking or mapping their domain onto our site. It's not scrapped as any edits appear immediately. Looking at the source code there is also no iframe present (hence assuming they're mapping or masking).

And ideas on how to stop them? Ideally just refuse the connection so nothing outputs?

Edwin · Oct 5, 2016

Hopefully somebody can give you the exact code, but what could help would be to have a .htaccess file with a section of code that checks whether the current URL matches your domain. If it doesn't then you can serve up an error code of your choice.

In other words, if your site is at sitea.com but it is also showing up at siteb.com because they've mapped siteb.com to your site, then if you check in .htaccess whether the URL browser bar is showing sitea.com or not you can block visits that way.

baldidiot · Oct 5, 2016

Yeah that's kind of what i was assuming would be needed. No idea how to do it though.

martin-s · Oct 5, 2016

Do you host on IIS or Apache?

baldidiot · Oct 5, 2016

Apache

martin-s · Oct 5, 2016

Probably some examples of using htaccess to check hostname headers out there somewhere.

Unfortunately I'm IIS-only, so not much use to you

mat · Oct 5, 2016

Something like this to redirect it elsewhere? I am sure you can get creative with where you send it

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.unwanteddomain.co.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://placetoredirectunwanteddomain.co.uk [R,L]

baldidiot · Oct 5, 2016

Excellent - thanks. That worked.

It's a new site so I'm actually thinking it's best to redirect to my site until google settles down and figures out what's going on, then I'll just kill it.

Is there a way to wild card the redirect so that baddomain.com/page goes to gooddomain.com/page?

Edwin · Oct 5, 2016

This should work I think...

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

It will redirect everything other than www.domain.com to www.domain.com (bonus: there's no "www" or "no www" confusion at Google's end when they're indexing incoming links to your site) and it should redirect pages/subdirectories correctly. But please test it carefully - I have a slightly tweaked version of the above on one of our sites, but some of the code may be specific to that hosting environment.