Penalised for accidental duplicate content

What's the fastest strategy for recovery?

[phaze]

We have a site that has been getting excellent traffic (800+ users per day from google). Recently our home page pagerank dropped to zero. PR on deeper pages has stayed the same, but traffic on the overall site has halved and continues to drop.

After whining on ww forums alot, I finally figured out my mistake. Because our main site is configured as the default on our server, all other domains that point to the server that don't have a site configured on that server are duplicates of the main site. There are 4.

And what I've noticed is that one of the sites which was around since before the main site has picked up the pagerank the home page had, and all other sites show pagerank of 0. Obviously google thinks that is the definitive site because it's the oldest, and all others are content thieves. And as google indexes the other site with PR4 on the home page, our main sites pages are dropping out of the index because they're perceived as duplicates.

So to start he long hard road to recovery, I have immediatelly set up seperate distinct pages for each site, and removed our main site as the default site. It now only responds to requests for www.oursite.com and oursite.com. I have also set up a 'default site handler' which exists to handle situations where someone points their domain at our server without us knowing. It's a random content generator that prints 5 fortunes using the unix fortune program.

I also plan to do a bit of SEO on each of the 4 domains that were pointing to our site to encourage google to reindex those pages quicker. Presumably our home page will be reindexed at some point.

Any other suggestions. And does anyone know how long Google takes to unpenalise us and give us our pagerank back?

Thanks,

pHaze.