I did a google search for the domain I manage (my_domain.com) with a keyword.

Found the site in the search results with the correct html title content, but the displayed domain is incorrect (not_my_domain.com). It isn't even owned by the company.

It seems not_my_domain.com is pointing to my linode IP address.

Checked the IP / DNS info on linode and the domain registrar which as far as I can tell looks correct.

Whatever is going on feels out of my depth of knowledge. Your input would be appreciated. Thank you.

not_my_domain.com has an A record or CNAME in DNS pointing to my_domain.com or your node's IP. You can't really do anything to prevent this. You can nicely (or not so) ask the owner of not_my_domain.com to not point to your IP.

my_domain.com is (likely) setup as the default virtual host in your web server config. Your web server is happily serving up content to anyone that comes by, no matter what domain they ask for.

You can change your web server config to use a different default vhost that either displays some message for unknown domains, or does a 301/302 redirect to my_domain.com.

I'd try THIS and then THAT.

Gee I guess we don't need those pesky details after all.

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

If we can see the DNS as published on the Internet we can figure out what's going on.

What are the real domain names?


By the sound of it this is either another domain pointed to your in error, or a troll ripping off your website content.

Yeah no problem. The domain is aerolog.co and the domain that seems to be pointing at its IP is r33.cooltext.com. I used WolframAlpha to check for other subdomains of cooltext.com and it seems questionable there are so many. - http://www.wolframalpha.com/share/clip? ... n9hciklqdk

The page is pretty basic; it's currently just an e-mail subscribe form.

Have you tried contacting them?
http://cooltext.com/Contact

Yep, contacted them with a friendly message, but haven't heard anything back yet. I suppose it might take awhile.

Setup a vhost for the offending domain, and then redirect that page to the obnoxious site of your choice. That should get their attention faster then any "polite" please fix your mistake email.

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

About 3 days after I sent the message I received a reply apologizing and that the issue had been fixed. As far as I can tell the subdomain is no longer pointing to our ip. I suppose the google search results will take a while before the correct domain shows with our content. I don't know of any tools that will fix that. Thanks again for the feedback everyone.

The "tool to fix the search results" would have been to simply issue a 301 permanent redirect from the http://r33.cooltext.com/ URL to the correct http://aerolog.co/ URL. Google would have updated the URL the next time it crawled the site, and in the meantime people clicking the r33.cooltext.com links in the search results would have still ended up at your site.

Now, the r33.cooltext.com results are still appearing in Google, but they take visitors to an error message instead of your site, and you have to wait until Google rediscovers the site at the new, correct URL. As far as I can tell, virtually nothing was gained by pestering the cooltext.com people, and you ended up screwing up your search results.

This sounds like a good reason to have a default vhost entry that doesn't load a site whose search rankings you happen to care about, since you can't prevent anyone from doing this, intentionally or not. I assume in this case Google saw the actual domain (aerolog.co) as a copy of r33.cooltext.com and penalized aerolog.co by essentially removing it from the search results entirely. Ouch.

Elegant solution, dcraig.