Domain as a subdomain on another site - Duplicate pages?

[coachm]

Just noticed that at least some of my pages are showing in SERPS as:

example.com.<zzz>.net/index.htm

and

example.com/index.htm

I've never seen this before, and don't quite understand this, but it can't be a good thing. Anyone know about what this means?

Could it be a misconfiguration somewhere?
A result of using cloudflare?

PS. the particular domain seems to be losing traffic over the last months (although that's hard to interpret).

[edited by: aakk9999 at 2:04 pm (utc) on Jul 10, 2015]
[edit reason] Obscured .net by replacing with <zzz> [/edit]

[aakk9999]

It certainly appears as some sort of misconfiguration.

When I tried <zzz>.net without your domain in front of it, I got redirected to a particular hosting company site. I am wondering if you can try the same and whether this is the hosting company you use?

If it is, then it seems that your domain can be accessed as a subdomain of your hoster domain. Hopefully a few lines in htaccess should be able to fix this.

From your post it appears that you also have an issue with index.htm vs domain root, this should be fixed too. I suggest you ask a question in Apache Web Server [webmasterworld.com] forum.

[coachm]

Thanks aakk999. The zzz.net part does in fact go to my hosting company. Spoke to them about it, and it has something to do specifically with them, running something called a shadow DNS. It seems obvious to me that it IS a misconfiguration on their end, as they claim google shouldn't be indexing the zzz.net pages, yet it is doing so.

They've been helpful, but only up to a point. It's the usual. Well, someone must have submitted these url's to google. <NOPE> The solution is probably something only they can do since I don't have any ownership of zzz.net, so I can't redirect from it, or access its robots txt file.

Sorry about putting something recognizable in my initial post on this. I thought zzz.net stood for something that was generic, when in fact it was something specific to my host.

[aakk9999]

The solution is probably something only they can do since I don't have any ownership of zzz.net, so I can't redirect from it, or access its robots txt file

I think you can in fact - because regardless of the host, it eventually goes to your folder on their server as this is the only way that your content will show under their name - unless they have copied it elsewhere.

So you need something in your .htaccess that says: if the request is not for example.com then redirect the request for example.com. Look up www/non-www redirect, it is pretty much similar to that. I suggest you head to Apache forum and ask the question there.