Recently I’ve been getting a lot of pingbacks and most of them comes from .co.cc websites. A pingback is a method for web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. Typically, web publishing software will automatically inform the relevant parties on behalf of the user, allowing for the possibility of automatically creating links to referring documents. For example, I’ve written an article on my Web log. Bob then reads this article and comments about it, linking back to my original post. Using pingback, Bob’s software can automatically notify me that my post has been linked to, and my software can then include this information on my site.
When I checked on these few websites, they appeared to be copycats, simply and blindly copying EVERYTHING word to word plus linking the images directly from my site stealing my server’s bandwidth. The reason why I got pingback notification is because sometimes I add links to my old article and they forgot to remove it causing them to link to my old post.
Dealing with copycats is easy. Normally I notify them via email IF there is a contact form (well most copycats don’t have one, maybe they don’t want to be contacted so that they can play ignorant) or leave a comment. If they don’t respond to my request, I will fax an abuse complaint letter to their webhost and they normally respond to it by suspending the website. Problem is .co.cc is not a webhost and they are just redirectors. Here is how I find their webhost for websites with .co.cc address.
CO.CC has an online form to report spam or abuse but all they do is just delete/suspend the URL. The copycats can sign up for a new account and redirect their original website to use a new .co.cc url. The best way is to find their webhost and then make sure that the copycat’s website get suspended and lose the articles that they spent hours or days copying.
This two sites (naisoft.co.xx & pcwilleasy.co.xx, replace the xx with cc) has been doing for it a long time and it’s time to let them know it’s wrong. All I needed to use is Robtex’s DNS tool that checks detailed DNS information for a hostname or a domain.
As you can see, naisoft is hosted at summerhost.info and pcwilleasy is hosted at atbhost.net. Try looking for the “Terms of Service” or “Terms of Use” page which contains information for you to contact them. If not, just try to contact the abuse department via support ticket or contact form. There will be times when these companies that provides free hosting ignores your request because they too think you cannot legally do anything to them. Well they are wrong. Normally they don’t own the servers at home and they rent the servers from datacenters. So contact their datacenter and they’ll surely comply with your request or else they’ll risk their servers being terminated. To find the datacenter, just do a whois on the IP address using DNS Tools.
As you can see, redirecting your wordpress, blogspot, 000webhost and etc hosted website to a .co.cc address to hide your original website don’t protect you nor let you get away from copying articles. The two copycats has complied with my request and removed the articles that they copied from here.