@Zoes This exact same thing is happening to us right now. We have 7 websites cloning ours!
Have you had any progress at all? I see that your clone sites are still live 
I also see that the person who is registered on all of the domains cloning us is the same person who is doing this to you.
We were able to get two of the sites removed through the registrar, which is Regtons by writing to abuse@regtons.com. We had originally discovered 4 clones. Two with Regtons and two with GoDaddy. The Regtons sites are both down. GoDaddy has not responded. We just discovered the other three domains today, which are all through Regtons. They have been extremely helpful. Hopefully they will act fast on these new domains as well.
We’ve also reported the domains to Google, Cloudflare, and ICANN. None of them have responded or done anything yet.
Offending Domains:
Here is the full list of domains that are cloning ours:
Redirect Script
I wrote a redirect script that can be placed on our website that checks domain and redirects to another site if it matches. I first tried one that checks to see if the domain matches ours, and redirects if it doesn’t. That didn’t work because it breaks the shopify backend. I’m sure it could be tweaked, but for now I just targeted the specific offending domains.
Here is the script:
You would just have to change it to match your offending domains. Yes, it needs to be placed in there for each domain. I know it’s not the prettiest code, but it does work for now. I’ll try to update it later. Or maybe someone here can.
I have it redirecting to a Google page that I threw together real quick. You can also redirect to your own site, but it won’t actually do that. It will break their site, though, by putting it into an infinite loop. The biggest problem with using a script is that it doesn’t stop Google from showing the sites in search results. But it’s something.
I don’t have the script in our site right now because I want the registrars, Google, etc. to be able to see the offending website.
Other Info:
These clones are sophisticated. They ping often and update quickly. Changes you make on your store are almost instantly updated on the clones. They have to ping so often that they get overloaded sometimes and go down. But not for very long.
They have scripts in place that check for your name and business info and replace it with theirs. If you add your business name into some text, you will see it swapped out for theirs on the clone site automatically.
Somehow they are able to rise through Google search very quickly to be on the first page with our site. I have no idea how they can do that, but they did. It took us quite some time to get to the first page, yet they somehow did it in a month for certain terms.
Background Info:
I’m not sure if it’s relevant or not, but not long before these sites popped up we received a couple of threatening messages from someone wanting backlinks for their client, as well as 5 star Trust Pilot reviews. Stating this if we didn’t comply:
“If I do not seeing a backlink in one week, I am create million toxic blog comment spam and redirect backlink to pnwjourney.com and you can saying goodbye to your Google rankings for 1 year or more.”
They said they are from Bizcope in Bangladesh. These clone sites are from Czechia. So I’m not sure if they are related, but it’s pretty coincidental.
I hope this is helpful for anyone else going through this, and I appreciate any help anyone has to offer. This is such a terrible situation to be in for a small business.
