Someone copied my homepage on a different domain

[SSG]

I was checking my website in AHREFS to see what links were picked up and I noticed this one website was linking to every page, category, and article. Pretty much linked to my entire site. So I checked it out and their homepage is identical to mine, but when you click anything it'll lead you to my site.

For example: If they clicked the contact page it would bring the visitor to my contact page on my site.

Why would any create this and what's the purpose?

 

[Michael]

Sounds like they ripped your design and didn't bother to change the links to their own domain. Why anyone would do this is beyond me though.

 

[SSG]

Sounds like they ripped your design and didn't bother to change the links to their own domain. Why anyone would do this is beyond me though.

Weird to just go through that and stop at the homepage. I'll keep my eye on it just incase they do something fishy.

 

[UWE]

I wouldn't worry too much about it, if anything it seems like you've done something great and worth copying

 

[kyescontent]

I think Michael is probably on target. Perhaps they are planning to go in later and change all the links? In any case, it is obviously a copyright violation, and you can complain to Google.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If it's noindex and it's not being indexed, I wouldn't worry at all. People do all kinds of stupid stuff on staging servers and don't have the sense to block access to it. But if it's noindex then no worries. Google will know its a rip off anyways. It's not going to harm you.

 

[KevinOH]

Someone did something similar to my site years back...only that this time they had ripped my content and put it on a web2.0 platform. I was worried at first but then realized their content wasn't even ranking. Personally, I wouldn't bother much if my site was still ranking higher than theirs.

 

[Trooto]

My guess is someone has ripped it and has landing pages for paid search on the domain. It may seem pointless from an SEO point of view, but would help with Quality Score in AdWords/Bing Ads.

 

[MichaelHayes]

Hmm, weird.

Had this happen once on a very large directory site, where a library was hosting a full duplicate (so users didn't have to use the outside internet to access it, or something).

I've also heard of super negative SEO where scumbags would grab content and publish it elsewhere before it got indexed. Keep an eye on it, put in a DMCA complaint if necessary.