Problem with duplicate content

I currently have a site that I believe is getting hurt in the SERPS because of duplicate content.

Here is the problem:

The site www.mysite.com (not really my site) is hosted on a colocated server at a hosting company. Thus, you can access the site by going to either www.mysite.com or www.hostingcompany.com/~mysite/

Somehow Google has indexed the sites at both URLs, and the subsequent links at both URLs. I have two questions:

1-Could this be hurting my site in the SERPS?
2-Does anyone have any suggestions on how to remedy this problem?

Thanks in advance.

 

No it wont be hurting unless the /~mysite/ is outranking your main domain, there is obviously another reason your rankings are poor.

In your root directorys .htaccess try a 301 redirect from your /~mysite/ to your main domain if you wish.

 

I'm thinking that you could stop Google from indexing the www.hostingcompany.com/~mysite/ ,as I would think that you don't really care if it's indexed by blocking it from crawling via robots.txt.

I'm not sure what mirrored sites do otherwise. Interesting question.

 

Good idea too! I think either would work.

 

Robots should be in the root which means the hosting companies domain root which he cant access, so a 301 in his folders . htaccess will fix it. A no cache wont work either because the browser is pulling the same index file for both URLs.

 

Sounds like a plan. Thanks for your advice sweetfunny.

 

Thanks for the suggestions and the quick response!

I'll give the 301 redirect in the .htaccess a shot.

 

You should setup 301 redirect from hostingcompany.com/~mysite/ to mysite.com

 

I agree with the 301 redirect in the .htaccess. I would definitely do something though. Google may not know the difference and could potentially penalize you if it is indeed indexing /~mysite/. It's all about the duplicate content and your current setup may look like spam.

 

Usually all webhosters dont allow index and follow for all parked domains. Are you sure between hostingcompany.com/~mysite/ isnt there a dir with restricted access? Like most of them /public_html/ or someting.

Try to simulate a crawl for hostingcompany.com/~mysite/ and see if u can get all pages indexed !!!!

 

I was under the same impression. Google seems to be hitting spammy sites pretty hard, and I didn't want them to think we were trying to increase our traffic through shady practices.

 

Use a redirect or use modrewrite for your site if you like.