There's a domain I've never heard of pointing to my IP address! What's going on?
Linode
Linode Staff
I recently setup Linode as a web server.
Recently I did a google search and found that my site content shows up under a different domain.
Google search results on about page three show my site on a domain name i've never heard of, which has nothing to do with my company. If I search the IP for this site, it comes back the IP of my linode.
I know its not scraped content because if I shut down my site, then it shuts down at the other domain.
Could anyone shed some light on why this might be?
I checked the ICANN WhoIs info for this domain and the info is protected and unavailable.
1 Reply
Well, that's certainly a bit odd! Your IP address is unique, but it is entirely possible for someone to setup a DNS entry pointing to your IP address. This almost certainly isn't malicious.
A likely scenario is that your IP address was previously used by someone else running a host on our network. They registered a domain for that IP address, and then at some point took down their web server without deactivating the DNS. Our IP addresses are re-used, so this kind of situation does occasionally occur.
If you'd like to do so, you could consider asking the owner of the domain to remove this IP address from his DNS record. You might be able to find the owner's contact information by using searching their whois record. Again, this does not represent any kind of malicious activity and I don't think anything shady is happening.
Please let us know if we can be of any assistance. Thanks!
Warm regards,
Benjamin
Linode Support Team