Ask HN: Whoa - why did Google bork us?

Google is suddenly linking to a test site, not our main site. Does PageRank not matter?

Looks like Google borked us, and with it, a lot of the effort we have done is currently being flushed down the drain.

Searching for our more common keywords (amahi, linux home server, linux home networking, linux server, etc.) leads to Google displaying (at least to many people), not our long-established, PageRank-6, award-winning, super-duper, url (http://www.amahi.org) but our internal site called admin:

   admin dot amahi dot org

as the link for Amahi!?! (forgive me that I not to link to it here!)

It doesn't even show the sitelinks they used to show because the admin site does not have them, according to Google's Webmaster tools (WMT). There are no links on the web for our admin site (we only use it internally), near as I (or WMT) can tell.

Also, the description is not the metadata description in our site, but it's picked up from a <p> somewhere down in the first page of the site. (I just noticed Bing also having this same description so, unless they stole it from Google, maybe it's our fault.)

We went to Google WMT and claimed the admin site. The content was identical to the main site most of the time. It allowed us to test new things in it and it was meant to be private! As of a few hours, it's doing nothing but 301s to www.amahi.org bug Googlebot is still slurping it.

Any ideas what went wrong here?

  - How can this happen?
    - How did their crawler find the admin site??
      - referrers?
      - a toolbar? (we don't use any - though maybe once or twice we did for quick testing)
      - ????
    - Does PageRank and their famous incoming link equations not matter?? How can this be so off?
    - Have we been punished? If so, for what? (we're not doing anything even remotely fishy - it's a nice burgeoning community)
  - How long will this last?
    - We have gone to WMT to dramatically accelerate the crawl rate of www.amahi.org
    - We have set the admin site to 301 all the way into the main site
    - We have asked WMT to not remove the admin site from the search index
  - More importantly, how can we prevent this from happening again?
    - More proactive monitoring?
    - Any recommended ways to do this efficiently?

Our traffic and users has been trending down for a few days now and we're not sure how long has been going on (we just started to look at the logs and Googlebot has been at it for a little while).