Last week I posted about a site my mom discovered that had copied the content from her site and has been positioning as their business. I had no clue what the motivation behind it was other than thinking it was just a sketchy way to either blackmail the real business owner or use black hat SEO tactics to increase traffic and monetize using AdSense.

After sharing my problem and getting a ton of advice, I sent a DMCA request to the host, Colocation America, and received a surprisingly quick reply. Within a few days I was on the phone with a representative from the site claiming that my mom had signed up for a service that was offering free mobile websites and that’s why my mom’s business information and content had been appearing on the other site. My mom doesn’t recall signing up for any site and I believe her - she’s been sending me nearly every offer she receives asking whether it’s legitimate and worth doing and I don’t recall ever seeing this one.

I suspect they use this as a cover for if they get caught and until then they make some money from their ads. In any case this particular issue was resolved pretty quickly and I wanted to thank everyone who helped. In particular, Rob Adler did a ton of research on the infringing site and Matt Cutts helped send this to the relevant teams at Google. The web’s not always getting worse!