Strange - unoptimized sites do well, but duplicate site question

Listed twice

[No5needinput]

Although this is my first post I have been an avid follower of this board for several months.
I have a rather strange dilemma
I had a site at Geocities for about a year. It was doing very well with great listings in search engines especially the big "G". I decided around 6 months ago to use the Geocities site update as I was far exceeding the free bandwidth allocation. Wherein Geocities registered my domain name and hosted my site. So my site changed from geocities.com/username to mydomain.com However it can still be accessed by searching for geocities/username as well as mydomain.com but the geocities/username search redirects to mydomain.com. I cannot control redirects its something Geocities does.
It took google approx 6 weeks to re-list this site under mydomain.com and all was fine.
However after the Sept update things changed. Near the start of the update a search for my sites KW's found my site listed back under geocities/username even though for the last 5 months it was listed as mydomain.com and links to my site all use mydomain.com
Now that things have settled after the update I am listed twice!
one listing under mydomain.com
one listing under geocities/username
Same site!
The strange thing is (apart from that)
1 - The mydomain.com listing has a slightly different title than the geocities listing (a change I made some time ago)
2- My site usually gets some content added - changed etc weekly and the only "fresh date" tag I get is to the mydomain.com listing
3 - A search for KW's on my site generally brings mydomain.com as no1 or 2 in results and geocities/username about 5 positions below it- SAME SITE!
Not complaining about the increase in traffic :-) but was wondering if I'll get penalised for having two listings through no fault of my own?

Just an observation:
I would probaly be considered as rather amateurish at webpage creation. I use a wysiwyg page designer. Lots of extra code on pages. Hundreds yes hundreds of nesting errors. No great optomising techniques. However I have a couple of sites and find it no trouble getting into top 10 and both sites are in highly competive areas.
I just wonder sometimes when I read some posts on here if maybe some seo's cant see the wood for the trees. As GG seems to constantly be saying - Dont optomise, provide good content. To tell the truth a couple of months ago I tried some of the optomising listed on here (NOT SPAM) things like changing internal links to page titles. Using a H1 tag on each page, placing text at top of page - Guess what? My ranking went down. So I just bumble on in my own amateurish way and get great results. Uniques are in thousands a day and generally stay on site for over 5 minutes. I give the vistors what they want, and my sales average 1 in 8 uniques. Well it works for me :-) I just get the impression far too much relevancy is placed on optomising sites and from what I've read on here recently - Its not working.
Just my thoughts :-)

[Digimon]

About your question just say that I've seen similar cases in SERPS and the time will solve it. The redirected url will be deleted in future updates. You shouldn't be afraid if you haven't duplicate content (and this rule is not always working, just search for a well known SEO softweare and you will find dozens of duplicated pages...)

About your good rankings without seo efforts:
Nice for you. Of course, that shows that google is a good SE and also takes care of the little webmasters (sometimes) but I need to say something, after read all these posts about "content as the best solution". I'm totally agree with the importance of content. If you haven't good content related with the querys you never should appear in the serps. But, and this is important, when you are playing in competitive markets you need SEO. Of course, you need it. Try to get high rankings for a real competitive like "widgets" ;-) without optimizing your site and after let me know what you get...

(Just needed to say it, I work as seo and I needed to say it)

Regards,

[rfgdxm1]

>However it can still be accessed by searching for geocities/username as well as mydomain.com but the geocities/username search redirects to mydomain.com. I cannot control redirects its something Geocities does.

Simple solution: DITCH Geocities. Unless Geocities is dirt cheap, you should be able to get a decent website host that has a clue. However, check first to make sure Geocities is doing the redirect incorrectly. Perhaps Google blew it?

[rfgdxm1]

>But, and this is important, when you are playing in competitive markets you need SEO. Of course, you need it.

It doesn't hurt for non-competive cases also to consider SEO. My main site is a dinky little non-commercial one. It isn't really in a competitive area. Half a year ago it was nowheresville in most search engines. I actually bothered to learn how to actually do things at least halfway right since then with honest SEO tactics. Like making sure to have relevant keywords in page title, decent density of these keywords on the page, etc. And consider getting into the DMOZ and Yahoo directory, etc. I'm now doing quite well in most search engines, including Google. I somehow even hit #1 this month on a main single word keyword search. This keyword is the generic name of a drug that appears on tons of websites out there. Including major drug companies, etc. Sometimes by accident someone can do well in search engines. However, odds improve if you actually get a clue and actually try relying more on crossing your fingers. ;)

[Digimon]

Completlly agree with you rfgdxm1

I think in the power and usefulness of SEO, even in non competitive makets. It is always good to make easy to people things (i.e. find your site in SE...)

Regards