how do site owners identify and prevent problems like that from happening?

We try to disambiguate as best we can, but if a webhost messes up on virtual hosting or DNS and returns the wrong content, that’s tough. The fact that both are on 69.20.96.165 makes me lean toward some DNS/vhost mistake by the webhost.

I don’t think it’s a virtual hosting issue. The amish domain is registered to a company using Rackspace dns servers. The gokart domain is a MonsterCommerce store. That means someone entered a MonsterCommerce IP into a Rackspace dns server. I guess it’s possible that someone made a typo, but I doubt it. To me, it looks a lot more like a deliberate act.

Let’s see. [site:amishfurnitureandcrafts.com go kart] returns results at Y, M, and Ask too. If all 4 search engines think your Amish site has go kart pages, maybe the answer lies with your webhost.

OK, I’ll admit that there is a certain level of confusion across all the engines, but I think you’re stretching a bit if you are implying that the way Google reacts to a situation like this isn’t any different than its competitors.

First off, no other engine returns the gokart site for the search “amish furniture”. I would guess that they don’t because there isn’t a single occurrence of the phrase anywhere on the page.

There is also a big difference in the number of reported backlinks. Yahoo and MSN return much different counts for each domain. Google returns the same number for both. Clearly, Google has decided it is one single site, whereas the two domains seem to have a bit more separation at the other two engines.

Another good example of this is how the other engines return results when you use search phrases that contain a combination of amish and gokart phrases. On MSN, if you search for “amish gokarts” it returns the site using the amish domain. If you search for gokart only phrases, they return the site using the gokart domain. Google doesn’t do that. No matter how you search, you always get the gokart domain.

But the bigger question is whether or not the introduction of a large volume of off-topic anchor text has a negative impact on a site’s ability to rank for its core terms? I’m not sure you can draw a firm conclusion from this example, but it does seem like it can.
I guess it’s time to go do a little testing….

Let’s see. [site:amishfurnitureandcrafts.com go kart] returns results at Y, M, and Ask too. If all 4 search engines think your Amish site has go kart pages, maybe the answer lies with your webhost.