Domain pointing at my website

[elchenuk]

Hi apologies if this is not the right forum for this thread.

I have a website which is related to health and insurance, nothing that could be classed as controversial such as payday loans, gambling etc. however for some reason there has been 3 separate occasions where a domain has pointed their A record at my website. So now I have this situation where three separate, unrelated domains point to my site.

My concern is SEO related, I have seen drops in rankings and traffic across the board. Could it be that search engines are seeing duplicate content? I don't understand what benefit the other sites can have by cloaking my site? Its not as if they are pigging back on my domain name, when you type in my brand name in to a search engine, none of the domains show up.

I have done a whois on each of the domains and contacted the relevant registrar in order to get them to change the A records however I just wanted to understand from anyone who has experienced a similar thing as to why it would happen and what I can do to prevent in future.

thanks in advance
eddy

[graeme_p]

No idea why, but if it worries you (and it does not feel right to me either) why not configure your server to either:

1) 301 redirect requests to those domains to yours
2) return a 404 if the domain is not yours.

You must either have your own server, or your own IP for this to work, so you probably can configure the server (at least with .htaccess which is all you need).

[phranque]

if you have proper hostname canonicalization in place those requests for non-canonical domains will never get a 200 OK and would therefore not be indexed.

[creeking]

could you create an "addon domain" website for those wayward domains?

[phranque]

eddy essentially already has an addon domain in this sense - assuming apache, i would guess he is missing a ServerName specification or has specified a wildcard ServerName/ServerAlias.
(or the equivalent situation if it's not an apache server)

[creeking]

the type of addon domain I had in mind was the type that would show its own index page and content. what that content would be is up to the OP. :)

(not a pointed or parked domain)