Sins of The Internet: Pagejacking

One of the most frustrating events you can experience as a
webmaster or writer is finding your work has been copied without
your permission. I'm sure that just about every writer and every
webmaster has been horrified to find his own work somewhere else
under a different person's name. The thankfully few times it has
happened to me I felt a mixture of blind fury and complete hate.

Sometimes thieves don't stop there. They don't steal a web page or
two and claim it as their own (this is merely a copyright
violation and a completely unethical thing to do). No, what they
do is steal a web page and claim it is YOURS, but with
modifications. In other words, they create a web page which is
exactly like yours, with some changes to do something undesirable.

Once they have added your page to a different site and made their
changes, they submit it to search engines, advertise it in ezines
and do all of the other standard promotional techniques. They may
also register similar domain names to try and fool people into
going to their illegal site. Their purpose is to steal your
traffic, directing it instead to their own web site (copies of
your pages).

Why do they do this? Well, let's say you have a page which is
attracting a heck of a lot of visitors. You are making quite a
bit of money from the affiliate links on that page. An unethical
person might make a copy of that page on their own web site, and
replace all of your affiliate links with his. Anyone clicking on
those links would be generating money for the pagejacker, not you.

Another common thing done by pagejackers is to add dozens or even
hundreds of links to pornographic sites, many of which pop up
automatically. Each time one of these links is displayed the
pagejacker gets paid a small amount, so the more popups they
display the more money they make.

Some pagejackers may go so far as to pretend to sell merchandise,
but never actually deliver anything. In this case, they are simply
stealing credit card information, which they then resell to
thieves at a substantial price.

What can a webmaster do to reduce the chances of this happening?
It's difficult, but one thing to do is keep an eye on your server
logs. If you see sudden changes in traffic patterns it's a good
idea to investigate and find out why. You can also search on your
own keywords and make sure that nothing strange pops up in the
search results. If you do find pages which have been stolen from
you, you can be sure that you will have a difficult time getting
them removed. You will need to find out who is hosting the site,
who the domain is registered with and so on, and submit complaints.
Whether or not these are acted upon depends upon where the site is
hosted and what the pagejacker is doing.

How do surfers get around this problem? Be sure the URL of the
site is the URL that you expect. It's better to bookmark your
favorite sites than to surf to them via search engines, as you can
have more confidence that a site is real if it appears in one of
your own bookmarks. Typing in the domain name yourself is another
good way to be sure you've got the right site. These tips are
especially true if you are going to spend money on the site.
Perhaps most important of all, always use a credit card, and
check the statements carefully for unexpected charges.