My host is competing with me for search results?

[tomequin]

The domain we own (eg: example.com) has shown up above the fold fairly well for related organic search strings for the last 8 years. However, over the last couple weeks results have also been showing up for our hosting companies domain (eg: examplecom.example.net). The search results will show both domains about 10% of the time for various searches but most of the time when the hosting domain shows results it's for new search strings related to the site.

We've always used the same host and have never seen this before. Who's copying who? Will I receive a penalty for copying my host? Will my host be penalized for copying me and therefore Google won't read my hosts servers?

Is this something I should be worried about?

[edited by: tedster at 9:18 am (utc) on Feb 15, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

There are a few hosts who serve your pages this way as an alternative address. When the practice first showed up I was anticipating some ranking issues from it, however this is the first such report I've seen. Most likely there are some backlinks, somewhere or other, pointed at the subdoman address for your content.

This is perfect opportunity to use the canonical tag [webmasterworld.com] on your pages. That should fix the problem without getting you into a wrestling match with your hosting service.

[tomequin]

Thanks Tedster for the quick reply. I'll spend some time reading the conocal tag thread you posted.