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Cybersquatting and Domain Name Poaching: Ensuring Your Not a Victim

re you losing visitors to your domain? Are your search engine rankings still yours?
Too often it is too easy for other people to hijack your search engine rankings and steal your website visitors. Oftentimes it is so easy that victims may not even notice it.

How does this happen?

Imagine your domain URL is listed in search engine results on Google, MSN and Yahoo. In the search engine results, most people that click on your domain URL are sent to your website. However, some people that click your domain URL are sent to a totally unrelated website, sponsored by a hacker who has targeted your domain name URL. It is often very difficult for a visitor to realize what has happened because although your website domain name URL is displayed in the browser, people see a completely different site that has literally nothing to do with you or your company.

How do these hackers steal your Visitors?

Hackers exploit a flaw in the software some domain name servers use and by sending incorrect information to these particular domain name servers, hackers compromise the domain name server to redirect the traffic for the URLs to another site.

Unless your domain name servers use a method to validate that the information has come from valid or authoritative source, it will send visitors to the wrong pages. This means that people who enter your domain name URL in the web browser will be sent to the hacker's pages instead of your own.

How can you protect you website?

It is extremely important that you use a reliable host that does not use an open DNS server. To check this, go to www.dnsreport.com and enter the domain name URL of your website. You should see PASS in the Open DNS servers line. If your domain name fails the test, you should contact your web host. If you don't want to expose your website to hackers, it is critical that you use a secure DNS server. If your web host cannot fix the issue, you should change to another web host.
About the Author
Enrico Schaefer is the founding lawyer at the law firm Traverse Legal, PLC, a law firm specializing in web law. You can find out more about protecting your domain name, UDRP arbitrations and anti-cybersquatting laws at Traverse Legal's stolen domain name and cybersquatting blog and trademark infringement and domain name blog.