I guess you guys understood the situation

Community
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Hello there,
I’m the current domain owner of kicad-pcb .org. I’m not disclosing my name for obvious reasons.
I acquire domain names which possess SEO value (Search Engine Optimization). Similarly i acquired this domain. I buy and sell the domain names as a part of my SEO business.

It’s very common that many good domains get expired and are auctioned on various registrars. Domains with good SEO metrics would go upto six figures. Kicad pcb is an excellent domain for seo purpose. This domain has 1.2 million backlinks from 11k unique referring domains.

Before listing the domains for the sale, We usually download the archived version of domain from wayback machine - https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■/ and host it for few days for google to re-index and retain its seo value. This is very common practice for seo domainers. Once google indexes the previous pages, Link Juice/ Page Rank gets effective then we delete the old content and it will be repurposed for various new niche sites.

In the similar manner i have downloaded the web archive copy and hosted it for 10 days i guess. Yesterday i removed the old content and listed for sale on escrow.

I got an email on today from cloudflare that my droplet got abuse from linuxfoundation. I have already listed for the sale before i got this email from cloudflare. I replied that i have already removed the content and it’s resolved now.

Now i did some reverse engineering on the web and found that there is lot of buzz about this domain on this forum.

I would like to clarify few things.

Many of the users are saying that it hosted malicious content
No, this is an archived copy from wayback machine and its the exact source code. No changes were made. The reason for making the site live is to retain seo link juice but not to scam the users.
Website copies can be downloaded from this site https://archivarix.com/en/

Some are replying domain hijacking
No, Its not domain hijacking. Someone from the organization has sold the domain and i bought it. This is a legit transaction involved with escrow

Intension for acquiring the domain name
This domain is purely acquired for seo reasons. Not to scam the users with malicious files or scripts.

what’s the future of this domain
This is a solid domain name with great seo metrics and would fetch great value when sold to seo people. I’ve already listed for sale. If the domain gets sold i’m not sure how the new owner going to use it. Most probably they would use it as a blog for electronics niche writing about reviews, informative guides etc., However it all depends on the buyer. i can’t guarantee if they will use it for legit purpose. It’s safe as long as i hold the domain.

If you guys think this domain is crucial for your business, make an offer. If i get any SEO buyer, ill be selling it. I’ll update if that happens I won’t be responsible for their actions. Thank you.

I would like to end this by saying - so far everything is in place. It’s not used in any malicious/phishing form. Let me know if you have any questions

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I haven’t seen this being said here. We have suspected that it’s a believable threat in the future. It still is, even though not by you (if you tell the truth, and I don’t doubt your word).

To me it’s one and the same. People who by used domain names to gain advantage from other people’s work and names is hijacking even though it’s legal. It’s not your fault of course that it’s possible at all, IMO the whole system is rotten.

Anyway, it’s of course good to hear that there are no malicious purposes ATM, and it’s interesting to know technical details about this kind of actions. But it doesn’t take away the fact that if people who try to find KiCad find something else because of someone using the domain name for their commercial benefit, it’s not good for the end users or the KiCad project and is unethical. No matter if it’s normal SEO business. It’s parasite business.

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So you intentionally pirate someone’s work and openly impersonate the site? Not shady at all. :roll_eyes:

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Lmao, great SEO value.

I destroyed the domains ability to ever appear in google results ever again :wink: The Google crawler will indefinitely ignore it.

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Google loves being scammed by SEO ‘artists’. Maybe a link to this thread sent to Google will help his SEO business right into the ground.

CC Bing, Duck Duck Go.

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I’d rater spend a week of my time to devaluate that old domain name than spend a cent more than the actual cost to transferring it’s ownership to someone with a kind heart to the KiCad project.

I was tempted to flag this thread as spam and I probably would have if it had not received a few replies from people I trust more then OP.

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This is not white hat obviously. But at the same its not black hat as well. We are not making any changes to original work or impersonating it on other domain names. Its just the same copy for few days for google
to reindex.

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“Domaining” lol. You didn’t need to invent a word, the word “leech” already works great

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lmaooo this is not reverse engineering you did a google search

you’re a guy who buys domains unscrupulously to try to extract money from them. a literal domain name landlord. quit trying to sound cool it’s not working

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@Seth_h flagged this because the OP was basically trying to alter the record. I restored the original content. The only means I had at my disposal at mod level was to suspend them so they couldn’t do anymore alterations. Truth is, I think we heard all that we needed as evidenced by the fact the OP was doing massive changes to his/her posts.

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