problem with indexing in google

[tqatsju]

hello, i am the webmaster of <mydomain.com>. We are having a ton of trouble getting the site indexed properly in google, somehow it is getting confused with another site, <othersite.org> which we have no affiliation.

Someone at position technologies told me that it has to do with reverse dns zones, i.e. <theirs> was the same as ours. when you do a site:<www.mydomain.com> in google all you get is the main site, when you do an in progress indexing of the site, you get all pages we have on our site but somehow index as <othersite.org>, which tells me that google is still indexing us as <othersite.org>.

You also get two pages that link to <othersite.org> when you do a link:www.mydomain.com. Which is really bad considering we are linked to a lot more on the web from all sorts of sites and i have worked on us getting linked too =(.

Anyway, i have contacted the hosting service of <othersite.org> and they told me they'd call me back and they never did, i'm going to call again tomorrow, but does anyone have a solution to this problem, it's really bugging me and hurting any type of ranking progress for us in google.

(this post is tough to follow without putting our site name and the other site's name in).

Thanks a lot.

[edited by: Marcia at 6:21 am (utc) on Aug. 18, 2003]

[Morgan]

It wouldn't be so bad if you had your site in your profile at least. Or you can sticky me, I don't know the answer for sure, but I'd look.

[Morgan]

Thought it'd be something to just wait on, but that is weird- site:www.example.com examplekeyword gices 500 pages froma totally different domain, the index page cache can be accessed from the SERPs but not if you're at the site and try to check the cached version.

Anyway, I would report it to Google and see what they say. The site: command should restrict the search to your domain, and it's not, so it's a legitimate thing for a bug report. I think [e-mail] is the way to do it. Mention in the subject line that Morgan told you so. Kidding.

[Netizen]

It should have nothing to do with reverse DNS - Google does forward DNS lookups i.e. if it finds www.domain.tld then it looks up the IP address. It doesn't then reverse lookup that IP address to make sure it is the same domain - GoogleGuy said as much in a post a couple of weeks ago, and it makes sense.

<edit>It looks like a Google "bug" so I would report it as suggested</edit>

[takagi]

This other site is somehow related to your site like an affiliate or so? There have been similar problems with affiliates having nothing but a doorway page to the real site.

[tqatsju]

no they were never an affiliate, i emailed google before and here is what they said to me:
<<<Thanks for your email. We apologize for the delay in our response.

We understand that your site, <domain> is being listed as the
result for <other domain.org>. This can occasionally happen if a webhost
serves us the wrong page when we crawl. So in this case, Google tried to
crawl the wrongdomain.org site and was served your site instead.

Once the listing is showing up in our search results, we can not manually
remove it. However, if the webhost fixes its setup so that it serves us
the correct page in the future, then this problem should fix itself within
a few weeks. We recommend you contact your webhost and ask them to make
sure that your page is not being served to requests for <wrong domain>.

However the problem with this is i don't control if they fix the setup, and the other problem is there are no pages on wrongdomain.org. So maybe it having no pages is preventing google from indexing our site again correctly?
Not sure.