Help. Exact mirror site on line

We did not put it there

[Monkscuba]

I don't know how, but I just saw an exact mirror site of ours on line, all the same pages, even a new page that I just downloaded today. Either I haved messed up the FTP program somehow, or someone is trying to get us banned by creating a mirror. How the hell could they do it anyway? Is it possible to just copy an entire site and give it a new domain name?

What should I do?

edit :

I just made a one letter change in the index page and this also appeared on the mirror, so it is somehow getting all the new data. What is going on? Needless to say, I am a bit worried about this.

[Marcia]

Did you find out who owns that other domain name?

[NeedScripts]

If I am not mistaken, there are few scripts/programs available that will do this (live changes/updates - if main site is updated, so will the mirror site be). All the owner of the mirror site needs to do is specify the link/site that he/she would like to duplicate.

Your best bet is to contact the owner and tell me *no*.

P.S.. Like Marcia said: Did you find out who owns that other domain name?

[Monkscuba]

Thank you Marcia.

The site is owned by...us.

Registered to the owner of the company, since before I was working here. So I guess I should ask him about it. I have never seen it before though, odd. All PR is grey on the google toolbar, which makes sense, as it would have no links, not submitted to any directory, it's like a ghost of our real page. Hope the boss knows how to get rid of it.

[bcc1234]

Check the IP for that domain.
Maybe it just points to the same box and the http server is configured to server the same content.

[jomaxx]

Probably it's just set up to point to the same IP address as your main site.

[Monkscuba]

Sorry for amateur questions..

How do I check the IP address?

I checked the owner via domains.com, but this doesn't seem to give any IP addresses.

If the IP is the same as our site, then it's just the boss that I need to see, right? If it's different, does this mean our site has been hijacked?

[Marcia]

Just go to the DOS prompt and do

C>ping www.thedomain.com

It'll probably turn up the same on both of them.

{Windows start button > programs > DOS )

[Monkscuba]

What would I do without you?

They are the same.

Does that mean i'm not being copied?
Should we remove this copy?
Will it annoy Google?

Thanx

[ciml]

In one sense, you're not being copied. Another domain points at the IP of your main domain and your server just returns the content for your site.

In another sense, you are publishing duplicate content on the Web. There are multiple URLs serving the same content, and as most sites use name based hosting (where requests to the same IP address but with different 'host' headers get different content) they will be spidered separately if they're linked to.

Google deals very well with duplicate content, merging the records in their index. Only one URL is kept (probably the one with highest PageRank), and that URL gets the backlinks (and PageRank) from both URLs. If Google get slightly different content (maybe because the page has changed between the time that Googlebot accessed the two URLs) then they are likely to be listed separately, splitting the PageRank.

Personally, I'd rather have the host issue an HTTP status 301 redirect to the main domain if another domain is accessed (the process depends on your Web server). That way, Google doesn't need to crawl both sets of addresses.

[bcc1234]

Go for permanent redirect.
That's the proper way to do it.
You should also have permanent redirects within your domain.
Something like
domain.com/page.html
should redirect to
www.domain.com/page.html
and www should serve the content.