Different domain names-same dns

Will Google recognize and penalize this?

[world3d]

I have four different URLs that are all hosted at the same major ISP. One is holding all the content and the others are pointing to the DNS of the hosted site.
Strangely, Google seems to be indexing one of the three "pointer" sites and ignoring the hosted one.
Is this something that Google might penalize? If so, would an html redirect at the three other sites fix the problem? Any help would be appreciated!

[ciml]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, world3d.

From your description, there's no difference between pointer domains and the hosted domain as far as the outside world is concerned.

If Google find identical content on the four URLs (i.e. the content hasn't changes between the spidering times) then you should expect Google to merge the four URLs in their database. This is a good thing, as you should get all four sets of backlinks credited to the one URL.

The URL with the best links is normally the one that remains. There were problems for duplicate content, now over a year ago when things were strange for a little while.

[world3d]

Thanks ciml! Relieves a lot of worry for me.
But here's the second part of the story that I think might be almost unique...
I HAD a url www.widget.com and 4 pointer sites (let's call one www.widgetsource.com). When the url widget.com expired, squatters pounced on it from Honk Kong and put up a search engine.

SO... I took everything that HAD been at that site and turned the pointer site into the hosted site. Now the other three point to widgetsource.com.

But, Google still sees widgetsource.com and Widget.com as being married. ie a link analysis to either shows the exact same results. I HAD been #3 for Widgets but the day the squatters took over, I fell out completely and haven't been back (This only happened in early December).

Does Google now hate widgets.com and everything it knows to be associated with it? Is there a way to make it recognize widgetsouce.com as independent from widgets.com?

Sorry for the long post but it's a somewhat complicated situation!
Any thoughts? THANKS.

[Ajack]

Not that I want to sound alarmist, but I had the same issue, and google combined indeed all my URL under the heading of one of the "pointers".

It was not good because I lost all my good Page Ranks.

I have been trying since to "kill" the pointer, but Google does not want to let go of it, so my ranking still suck.

It's been almost a year.

I just would not do it.

Ajack

[ciml]

world3d, the merging in Google is due to identical content so it should resolve itself once Google's had time to catch up with the changes.

Ajack, your best approach is not to serve your pages when the wrong host header is sent; that way you'll be de-merged. If you redirect to your domain then you should be able to get the traffic in the mean time as well. Hopefully your hosting company will help you.