Someone else is using my IP address with an old A Record. What can i do?

Question

I found out that someone who used to have my current IP address, still has an old A record and google is using that for returning search results. As a result, when someone searches the name of my website in google, it shows their url and my sites metadata and name. And when anyone clicks on the link it goes to our website but uses their domain name. (Displays invalid security certificate though)

I have already done a whois lookup and made an attempt to connect the owner of the registered domain name.

If i never hear back, what can I do to fix google search results?

Answer 1

The simplest solution is to just return a 403 or 410 response for any traffic on the unwanted domain.

In .htaccess on Apache you could do something like:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [L,R=410]

In Nginx you could do something like:

server {
  listen       80;
  server_name  domain.com www.domain.com;
  return       410;
}
server {
  listen       443;
  server_name  domain.com www.domain.com;
  return       410;
}

Answer 2

Thanks everyone. What fixed it was the previous owner of the IP responded. He was really nice considering he had no idea who I was, but he fixed it by removing the old A-Record.

But if he never got back to me, what Andrew Lott said would be the next course of action.