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Ask HN: What to do when someone clones your site?
Our B2B SaaS had its entire website cloned at another domain. The cloner then took the time to create a new logo and change a few colors.
We reached out to the hosting provider, and the registrar, neither care.
The cloned website is hosted in Europe (Germany), with a small hosting provider. Domain registration appears to be hostinger.com.
Our concerns: Search engine trouble, potential customer confusion, lost sales.
We found the clone when ahrefs started reporting a new domain linking to one of our sites, because they'd helpfully cloned our entire footer.
Thanks for all your advice!
- LinuxBender 4y agoDisclaimer: 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.
- snide 4y agoControversial 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.
- preinheimer 4y agoThanks. They haven't cloned the actual product, just the marketing copy on the public site. We've been around for ~10 years, so we have plenty of history with search engines, and a reasonable amount of organic links spread around the internet.
- cunningfatalist 4y agoWe've also been copied in the past. At first, it was a little concerning. But it turned out that people cannot be ahead of you if they're busy copying your features.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dewey 4y agoFocus on your product, there will always be competition and they'll lose interest quicker than you.
- blitzar 4y agoImitation is the sincerest form of flattery
- dqpb 4y agoControversial opinion: DDOS them
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI once worked with a chap that did that. The miscreants DDOSed right back, X100, and he lost his entire site. I'd gently suggest against bear-poking.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoHow did they know who was behind the ddos?
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoNot sure. It was many moons ago, and he recounted it to me, so I did not observe it, myself. At that time, DDOS was still a fairly new (and highly effective) technique. Slightly different context. They were exfiltrating data from his site, as opposed to completely cloning it.
- notakio 4y agoVia a link posted here, perhaps. A "soft" DDOS, if you will.
- preinheimer 4y agoI feel like in a race to the bottom we have the most to lose. Both reputationally, and as like a real company with assets worth suing for.
- ltbarcly3 4y agoDo 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.
- gmiller123456 4y agoGet 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.
- preinheimer 4y agoIt's incredibly unlikely they've cloned our actual service (which would require hundreds of proxy servers around the world). They've cloned the marketing part of our site.
- marmetio 4y agoIf they copied anything you can see with "view source" and you haven't licensed it in that way, a lawyer could help you. If they copied the layout by writing their own code and creating their own assets, then I'm not sure.
- ipaddr 4y agoWhy does it matter then
- johnwheeler 4y agoI think they’re worried about the seo which is valid concern
- supernikita 4y agoLawyers in Germany are cheap (compared to US lawyers). Normally they charge a percentage of the value of stake which is quite small since its regulated by the law and not negotiated. Also, in Germany, loser pays all, i.e. own lawyer, court costs, your lawyer.
- scarface74 4y agoFor 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.
- idopmstuff 4y agoFor 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.
- runjake 4y agoYou 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.
- jjgreen 4y agoClone theirs! ... oh wait ...
- dopeboy 4y agoIf 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.
- sublinear 4y agoIn theory isn't this what EV certs are for? I know users don't really notice though.
- preinheimer 4y agoWe actually bought an EV cert years ago! Modern browsers don't actually give them any special display features these days, so it doesn't seem worth it.
- nicbou 4y agoIf 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.
- avree 4y agoI don't think they will have much luck, in Germany. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-clone-factory https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-clone-factory
- bar000n 4y ago2012 story from Wired
- mtmail 4y ago> My website (see profile) The value of the 'email' field is hidden to other HN users. Only the text in 'about' is visible to others.
- codetrotter 4y agoI'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that nicbou may have been refering to https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nicbou https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nicbou That list of submissions include many from his personal domain and another site he has, namely https://allaboutberlin.com/ https://allaboutberlin.com/ List of English-speaking lawyers in Berlin https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/english-speaking-lawyers-berlin https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/english-speaking-lawyers-b...
- tarotuser 4y agoYou 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.
- kube-system 4y agoIf you’re actually worried about customers confusing the sites, this might not work out well.
- StratusBen 4y ago1) 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 https://twitter.com/Bensign/status/1512110156275986433
- baggsie 4y agoGeneric design system looks generic shocker!
- mynameisvlad 4y agoThis. There's only so many ways you can design a graph, table, and rule editor. The icons just seem to be from two packs, so they likely picked out the most appropriate icon for the action, and when you have limited icon packs you'll likely converge on similar icons. Notably, in a reply where they're calling out the similar icons, only one is the same while the other two are different, the only similarity that one of them has a graph.
- digerata 4y agoI have to disagree with both comments on this... That was my first thought as well. But looking at the screenshots in the Twitter post, it goes beyond design systems. Structurally, it's the same. Layout, it's the same. Purpose, it's the same.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoI don’t really buy it. There’s only so many logical ways to layout a graph, breadcrumbs, and table. If the breadcrumbs perform an action, which they seem to do, then you’ll want them center to emphasize that. That’s just basic UX design. I could argue they copied the query builder from dozens of different sites because they all look identical. It’s a query builder, there’s only a few ways to design and implement one. The tables straight up are just standard design tables. They could’ve come from Bootstrap at how plain they look. The only thing they have in common in terms of the things they show is costs, which, I mean for two tools used to keep track of cloud spending, seems like a given. The copy is completely different even if the purpose is the same, and “slicing and dicing data” is a go to phrase in the industry. We used the phrase all the time when developing a graphing tool. Nothing in that Twitter post is unique. It’s what I, and I’m sure many others would converge on for any sort of tool that interacts with graphed data. Especially for two tools in the same space, there’s only so many ways to show people their cloud costs. If anything, both companies just have extremely generic looking and feeling UIs.
- geocrasher 4y agoFile a DMCA complaint and move on with your life. Reference: 24 years in the web hosting industry
- bloak 4y agoIs 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.)
- tchock23 4y agoJust 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…
- Joel_Mckay 4y agoDo 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.
- sithlord 4y ago>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. if its a SaaS, they are likely talking about the marketing site - not the logged in experience.
- Joel_Mckay 4y agoThan they did not setup incentivized service deals, partner profit-sharing arrangements, or licensing agreements. Thus, a castle without a moat you can fill with legal alligators. Note, a service company is actually easier to handle than shipped product firms. Cheers ;)
- amelius 4y ago"Good artists copy, great artists steal" ... Without people blatantly copying stuff, we wouldn't have the iPhone.
- Towaway69 4y agoApparently in Chinese culture, copying is seen as a complement.
- iguana_lawyer 4y agoYes. In college I always saw the students from China complementing each other’s assignments.
- logicalmonster 4y agoAfter 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.
- andai 4y agoBrilliant. I'd add to this that the domain name shouldn't just be a constant at the top, because then they can just change it. My first guess is, make a few functions that "generate" it, kind of like what some people have on their websites for their email address.
- jackweirdy 4y agoGoing to plug my own blog from a few years ago to illustrate how you can generate strings and even functions from non-alpha code characters: https://www.jackwearden.co.uk/blog/bending-javascript-type-coercion/ https://www.jackwearden.co.uk/blog/bending-javascript-type-c...
- r1ch 4y agoThere'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
- brandon272 4y agoI 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.
- spiffytech 4y agoWhen 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 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-advantage-and-450 https://softwaresocial.substack.com/p/talking-competitive-ad... https://softwaresocial.substack.com/p/competitive-advantage-and-moats-for-a3e https://softwaresocial.substack.com/p/competitive-advantage-...
- snickerbockers 4y agoAnd 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.
- boplicity 4y agoIt is indeed the host's responsibility to remove any content that is violating IP rights -- at least when there is a DMCA request filed. No need to get a lawyer involved, unless the host is not following the required procedures.
- preinheimer 4y agoThey've copied 100% of the text, images, styling, etc on the public version of our site. They have changed a few colours in some select images to better match their theme. I'd guess that they have 0% of our product copied.
- boplicity 4y agoDefinitely 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.
- preinheimer 4y agoAre non-US companies required to care about the DMCA at all?
- welly 4y agoEssentially yes. I guess in a similar way US companies are required to care about GDPR, if they want to operate in other regions. There's a bit more info here: https://www.copyrighted.com/blog/dmca-guide https://www.copyrighted.com/blog/dmca-guide
- josefresco 4y agoWebsite 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?
- ghostbrainalpha 4y agoSEO. Backlinks for old domains are valuable.
- josefresco 4y agoIs it impossible (for Google/Bing etc.) to detect changes in domain status/ownership?
- ghostbrainalpha 4y agoEven if they could detect changes in the WHOIS ownership they wouldn't be able to determine an appropriate change from an illegitimate one. People accidently let domains expire and renew them, or sell them legitimately all the time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- a_c 4y agoAgree 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
- lopkeny12ko 4y agoDo 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.
- jFriedensreich 4y agoi 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.
- devwastaken 4y agoIf 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.
- dingosity 4y agoI 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.)
- e_i_pi_2 4y agoI 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
- autoexec 4y ago> I think I agree with others here - this isn't a real concern. I'd argue that the ability for people to copy generic design features from other sites and tweak them according to their preference is a positive thing. People making websites by using designs found on other websites is basically the entire history of the internet. Content is what matters.
- joecool1029 4y agoGerman 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.
- Animats 4y agoAre they linking to any images on your site? Ones you can change?
- suprjami 4y agoMake 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.
- ghrhtjtkfncn 4y agoDMCA?
- renaudl_ 4y agomy 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.