When I went to wisenut to see their reported update, I found my old personal site there under another completely different domain name. Instead of isp.com/~myname/ it is now also listed as dormantdomain/~myname/. There are at least 102 of my pages listed that way on wisenut and I found 148 other sites hosted by this ISP with the same mistake.
I'm using an .htaccess on the ispname.com/~myname/ site to permanently redirect to my actual domain and this redirect is also working for the dormantdomain/~myname/ listings.
I called my ISP last night and the tech on duty couldn't help - promised someone would call me this morning. So far, no calls although I've called two more times this morning.
I called the owner of the dormant domain last night and he told me the domain had been dormant for at least 16-18 months. He is listed as the administrative contact, but my old ISP is listed as the technical contact. Some of the pages I checked that are listed in wisenut were taken off the server in April 2002 so I know this is a very old problem.
I'm terrified that google will see this as an attempt to have a mirror and I'll get penalized for another 10 months or forever. I also wonder if something like this happened before and is what may have influenced the original penalty.
Any suggestions, what can I do?
I've called wisenut and gotten a name for someone at looksmart but this won't solve the problem long term since anytime a domain goes dormant at this ISP all tilde sites will be picked up with the dormant domain name. If this was the way the net was run by all ISPs, there would be billions of mirror sites out there.
If anyone is in Texas or several other states and you want to know who this ISP is, sticky me. Scrap that Texas thing, I just discovered they now cover all 48 states and some of Canada.
What a mess! And, I'm still scared!
Any CPanel/WHM hosted *nix/BSD box works the same way. Right now, I can go to my home page, and type in mydomain.tld/~someuser and bring up their site. It's just the way Apache happens to be set up.
Somewhere out there someone must have linked to your site as thatolddomain.tld/~yourusername, that's the only way it would have come up.
There are over 140 sites on wisenut that are also listed that way. I checked two of them that are active domains on the ISP. Using theirdomainname.tld/~myname my site does not come up.
Those two are active domains and it doesn't seem to work that way, so are you saying that this is a problem with inactive domains? Of is it not working with these two because they have their own 404 error file? The ISP has a default 404 that used to work on my site until I redirected all the pages.
Sorry, that wasn't clear. Those 140+ listings are all different sites at the same ISP using the same dormantdomain.tld. Some of these are such small sites I can't believe they were ever linked to by anyone.
