Google displays wrong domain

Moderately confused...

[wolfadeus]

Hi there,

I just did a google search on a major keyword and found my site with a good ranking as "www.registrarcode/directory/subdirectory.index.html" rather than the expected "www.example.net"

What? Why? That never happened before and the site is online for months? Advice is much appreciated...

[chrisranjana]

I'm not sure whether I understand your post

Are you saying that Google is showing one of your inside sub level pages rather that your main domain url in its search results?

If so did you promote your sub url more than your main domain?

I.e are there many inward links pointing to your sub url than your main domain?

[kaled]

What happens when you follow the Google link to this page? Does it show a copy of your page or does it redirect to your page? If it redirects, you should probably try a search along the lines of:-

site:webmasterworld.com page-hijacking

There has been much discussion of this problem.

Kaled.

[wolfadeus]

Sorry, I was unclear; the site is hosted by a major company, which gives me the root directory of "www.companycode12233344444.us"

In this directory, I created a subdirectory that is my website's root and contains the index page as well as a subdirectory with one of my major sites.

Thus, if you google the keyword mentioned above, you normally see the domain (which forwards to the root directory) in that way: www.example.com/subpage.htm

However, today it shows: www.companycode12233344444.us/directory/subpage.htm

That sucks. I don't like that. And it hasn't happened before. Googeling other keywords leads to a normal display of the domain.

Thanks for your advice!

[wolfadeus]

An amendment: a yahoo "linkdomain" reveals that my commercial root ("www.example122333444.us") has 9 MFAs linking to it. Could that be the reason?

[wolfadeus]

And another amendment: To make things worse, google displays BOTH urls in some searches, as if it was TWO domains leading to the same content - so if I am very lucky, I'll get penalized for the whole thing...

[wolfadeus]

Advice? Anyone? Thanks in advance.

[kaled]

It has been said that using the <base> tag to specify the correct url helps, however, I can't comment on the truth of this.

Kaled.

[Kymation]

I had the same situation. My immediate response was to throw a robots.txt file in the hosting company root directory to ban all access to all robots. On reflection, a 301 redirect would probably have been a better idea. Either way should work, but the redirect might save some of your existing page rank.

[g1smd]

The base tag on every page and a site-wide 301 redirect will get you out of the mire.

[wolfadeus]

Thank you - how can I do a site-wide 301 redirect?

[g1smd]

Add a couple of lines of code to the .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The above sorts out non-www and www URLs for the main domain. Then add additional RewriteCond and RewriteRule lines for redirecting the other domain to the correct one.

[wolfadeus]

Thank you - unfortunately, I don't have an htaccess file (in fact, I just heard the term for the first time and had to look it up what it means).

Do you know of templates I could use? I'm slightly worried to fiddle with the site as I am not knowing about the matter at all. Best,

W.