Odd domain redirecting to my site.

probably a small typo in the dns entry ip address. Are they similar for the .com?

Just send them an email and let them know. There's nothing to be gained by anyone having it point to the wrong place.

That's what I thought to start with, but I checked and they aren't remotely alike.

Something similar happened to me on a Linode server.

Some random domain pointed to my site which I also found very weird. I managed to contact the owner of the site and apparently he also used to host on Linode and deleted his server but he left the DNS for the domain pointing to the Linode IP address. The IP address must of got recycled to me which resulted in 2 domains pointing to one IP address.

It was a very strange problem but could be something similar?

Yes, basically because of the fact most service providers recycle the IP, and sometimes people forget to remove it from the DNS zone file ...

The thing is though, we've had the IP addresses for years. This has only started happening recently. I noticed because it popped up as in inbound link.

we've had the IP addresses for years

May be someone goofed up their DNS entry. Why do you care, additional load ???

If you are too concerned, just add a middleware to blacklist the domain and it to global stack at the beginning.

Let me get this straight. You are complaining about extra traffic? Feel free to redirect it to me then.

I hope you pay more attention to your design specs than you do to this thread. Nowhere have I said that I am complaining about this. In fact, I redirected them to point to my portfolio. Given that the domain name was for an IT recruitment company, it could prove lucrative.

I was just curious as to why somebody would do that.

In theory, there could actually be an SEO hit. If I have this page:

mysite.com/ace_page_about_widgits

Lets say google laps this up and boosts me to the top of the widgit pile.

Now, because of the way Plesk treats default domains, if you redirect another domain to point to that server, you could pollute the SEO.

It would appear like this:

xxx_donkey_capers.com/ace_page_about_widgits

Now, as I always use rel=canonical to a hardcoded domain root, it wouldn't be an issue in my case. But it can still look weird when you are searching for stock items for your ecommerce site to have them appear on another domain as well.

it happened to me just today,

i had a vps with DO long before and i have a sub-domain pointing to it after client work is over, i destroyed my droplet

today, i am collecting my portfolio and when i typed that domain ( i forgot i destroyed droplet) its showing someone else site, i was surprised a bit first then realized what is going on.

mine is opposite story of what you are experiencing.... so mostly it may be their mistake (unknowingly).

You could also be SEO penalised for duplicate content?

That's what I was referring to above. As I had hard coded a rel=canonical attribute it was ok, but if you used route() to generate it, or didn't specify one, there would definitely be SEO implications. I found this out the hard way once, when I used a spare domain name to roadtest a new site layout. I forgot to put a password on it to prevent any crawlers or casual browsers from seeing it. Before I knew it, the products were turning up in web searches under the new domain. And because the new layout I was testing was more SEO friendly than the old layout, the test site was doing better in the rankings than the old, still active site!

Fortunately I spotted the error nearly immediatley, and the test search results dropped out of google a week or two later. But playing silly buggers with domain names can cause unforeseen problems.