Shared SSL hosting receives all SSL requests but why is Google getting it wrong?

Question

The website is hosted on a shared server that supports SSL. The web hosting provider secures our website using SSL:

https://domain.com instead of http://domain.com

Ever since then all the client HTTP requests sent to the server are redirected to my website. Leading https://otherdomain.com and I'm presented with a warning message.

I now know its my fault and I should of known that most SSL certifications only support one IP address but...

Google Search results for my website's target keywords is now displaying these websites above my own, even though they have nothing even remotely related to the target keywords!

Already Done:

• provide canonical URL in the HTML page.
• told the problem to the server manager, who tells me it's normal but he'll look for a solution. This was one week ago, no answer since.

I have no idea why Google is providing these HTTPS URLS: i thought someone would have to submit them, or have them inside an HTML page in order for Google to actually index dummy HTTPS domains, but i see no reason why someone would do that.

Any suggestion on how to solve this situation? Go-live is in one week and SEO looks really bad because of that.

Answer 1

You should just do a check in the head of your website (I'm assuming it runs on PHP or something) and check the http-host header. If its yours, process normally, else redirect to an error page or generate a 404 or something.

That way your site keeps its content (and ranking) and the other domains that are sharing your IP get a generic page that takes away their page ranks for your content.

Answer 2

I solved it thanks to @mark handerson (sorry i'm unable to accept your answer since i'm not recognized by SE as the question asker. If a moderator could do that, it would be great. )

here is a php snippet that did the trick...

if($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']!= 'mydomain.com'){
    header("Location: https://mydomain.com",true,301);
    exit;
}

Answer 3

You have a little control over the google index with robots.txt and google webmaster tools. You should look into them.

Another thing: SSL sertificates are not bound to an IP but to a domain. You will have to get a new certificate. I don't wan't to do commercial but if you want a quick, free and accepted certificate you can get one at StartSSL.