The domain we own (eg: mydomain.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: mydomain.myhostsdomain.com). 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. 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?
Yes it is technically duplicate content. What do you suggest I do? Change hosts after 8 years of perfect hosting services? I don't really want to do that. But then I've never competed against myself for search rankings.
you could use the canonical tag to show google the correct url for your pages. IE. <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/" /> Code (markup): or what ever the correct url for the page is. also make sure you use the full url in internal links not relative links.
Either you linked to it by mistake or there was a DNS glitch. 301 mydomain.myhostsdomain.com to mydomain.com Bompa
You should definitely do a 301 redirect as well as use the canonical tag, just to be sure. Then you wait for Google to work it's magic.
Thank you for the canonical tag suggestion and after a little research I have to agree with you. It definitely could be the way to go as it seems to be a great fix for publishers (like me) who only have a "Publish" button and don't have the access required to do server-side adjustments. But before I start, any suggestions on placement? All pages? Only the pages that haven't been affected? Only new pages? Root file? Thanks for your input.
It's probably best to do it in all files, in my opinion. Just to make sure it doesn't happen again in future.