Enrico Schaefer is the founding attorney of 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 domain name theft and trademark infringement domain dispute blog.
Are you losing visitors to your domain? Are your search engine rankings still yours?
There are countless stories of hackers who have overtaken other's search engine rankings and redirected intended website visitors, with victims who have not even noticed.
These stories consist of a domain URL listed in search engine results on Google, MSN and Yahoo. In the search engine results, most people that click on a person's domain URLs are sent to their website. However, some people that click their domain URLs are sent to a totally unrelated website that has nothing to do with the intended target, even though the original domain name URL is displayed in the browser. These consumers than see a completely different site that has literally nothing to do with the one sponsored by the victim or their company.
How do these hackers steal Visitors?
Hackers exploit a flaw in the software some domain name servers use 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.
If domain name servers do not 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 pages.
How can you protect your 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.
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