Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
-
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site.
Here is an example:
A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result.
But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced:
UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXTUNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27
There are more but those are just some examples.
These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.
-
For those that are interested, we figured out the root of the problem and the fix. Maybe this will help someone down the road. Thanks to all that responded.
As it seems all the domains/accounts hosted on our VPS are top level; so we couldn’t use robots.txt to fix this.The problem:
-We have a handful of websites using a shared IP address – Only sites with SSL cert get a dedicated IP
-Some of these websites have additional A record DNS names (mail.domain1, ns5.domain2, etc) that all resolve to that shared IP address
-Within your browser if you went to one of those records it would pull up the website (account) that is first alphabetically within that shared IP pool
-It’s assumed that a website or multiple websites somewhere in the web must have linked these domain names somewhere on their webpages – so search engines crawled them for the content of that first alphabetical website
-Search engines then indexed the content of that site for these other DNS A records and displayed the alternate URLs in the SERPSThe fix:
Edit Apache’s httpd.conf file on our VPS – adding a new (first listed) virtual directory of that shared IP address to point to the servers cpanel default cgi page instead of listing one of our hosted accounts first.
This page describes what we needed done and what fixed it for us: http://forums.spry.com/cpanel-whm/1568-how-can-i-change-default-page-ip-address-points.html
Thanks again!
-
You should be able to resolve this with robots.txt and .htaccess files, but one more thing I've learned to do is to use a domain name for the primary domain that I do not plan to submit to Google for indexing. For example, I'll use arbitrary color names like silverblue.net as the primary domain and then the domains I intend to index will be virtual domains. This isn't really necessary but it helps me keep all my domain names straight in my head and avoid the issue you described above.
Best,
Christopher -
Thanks for the replies, guys. We are going to try Christopher's suggestion first and we'll update the question when it's resolved!
-
The other domains are ours, yes.
Oh, that's a horse of a different color. If you have multiple domains on one account, one domain will be the primary domain and the other domains will be virtual domains. If you look at the file structure on your server, all the virtual domains will be sub-folders under the primary domain. You need to create a robots.txt file in the primary domain that blocks the spiders from discovering the other domains through the sub-directory structure. Otherwise, all the virtual domains will be duplicated, once via the primary domain and again via the virtual domain.
Best,
Christopher -
The other domains are ours, yes.
I don't think any of them are using Joomla.
-
Are those other domains also yours, by any chance and/or is this a Joomla cms?
-
Wow... that's not so ideal. My guess is that all of those sites are sharing the same IP address, and the server's settings are such that if you hit the IP address with a forward slash (i.e. http://00.00.00.00/domainname/) it's showing content.
My $0.02 is to find a new hosting company.... and one that gives each site it's own IP address instead of doing shared-level hosting with the same IP address in a name-based space.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
404's after pruning old posts
Hey all, So after reading about the benefits of pruning old content I decided to give it a try on our blog. After reviewing thousands of posts I found around 2500 that were simply not getting any traffic, or if they were there was 100% bounce & exit. Many of these posts also had content with relevance that had long ago expired. After deleted these old posts, I am now seeing the posts being reported as 404's in Google Search Console. But most of them are the old url with "trashed" appended to the url. My question is: are these 404's normal? Do I now have to go through and set up 301's for all of these? Is it enough to simply add the lot to my robots.txt file? Are these 404's going to hurt my blog? Thanks, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
Translated version of meta description showing in SERPs
Hi all, When a search for our brand is done, the homepage is shown but the meta description is in French. We have a translated version of the site available once the user is on the site, but there's no reason it should be displaying the translated version in the SERPs. This issue has never happened before and began last week. Anyone seen anything similar? https://www.google.com/search?q=revolve+clothing Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Robots.txt - Googlebot - Allow... what's it for?
Hello - I just came across this in robots.txt for the first time, and was wondering why it is used? Why would you have to proactively tell Googlebot to crawl JS/CSS and why would you want it to? Any help would be much appreciated - thanks, Luke User-Agent: Googlebot Allow: /.js Allow: /.css
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Is it common for a site to disappear and reappear in the SERPS?
I have a site that's 2 years old and it completely disappeared from the search results. It wasn't a manual action because I never got a notice in webmaster tools. Could the site reappear? A lot of people on Odesk say the site will reappear after a few days.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Kiwi_Man0 -
My blog's categories are winning over my landing pages, what to do?
Hi My blogs categories for the ecommerce site are by subject and are similar to the product landing pages. Example Domain.com/laptops that sells laptops Domain.com/blog/laptops that shows news and articles on laptops Within the blog posts the links of anchor laptop are to the store. What to do? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
What to do when all products are one of a kind WYSIWYG and url's are continuously changing. Lots of 404's
Hey Guys, I'm working on a website with WYSIWYG one of a kind products and the url's are continuously changing. There are allot of duplicate page titles (56 currently) but that number is always changing too. Let me give you guys a little background on the website. The site sells different types of live coral. So there may be anywhere from 20 - 150 corals of the same species. Each coral is a unique size, color etc. When the coral gets sold the site owner trashes the product creating a new 404. Sometimes the url gets indexed, other times they don't since the corals get sold within hours/days. I was thinking of optimizing each product with a keyword and re-using the url by having the client update the picture and price but that still leaves allot more products than keywords. Here is an example of the corals with the same title http://austinaquafarms.com/product-category/acans/ Thanks for the help guys. I'm not really sure what to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aronwp0 -
301's & Link Juice
So lets say we have a site that has 0 page rank (kind of new) has few incoming links, nothing significant compared to the other sites. Now from what I understand link juice flows throughout the site. So, this site is a news site, and writes sports previews and predictions and what not. After a while, a game from 2 months gets 0 hits, 0 search queries, nobody cares. Wouldn't it make sense to take that type of expired content and have it 301 to a different page. That way the more relevant content gets the juice, thus giving it a better ranking... Just wondering what everybody's thought its on this link juice thing, and what am i missing..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ravashjalil0 -
Is Video Sharing sites is still useful for SERP ?
Well I am not talking about the audience views, i am asking whether it is good for submitting videos to multiple video sites for backlinks and any sharp movements for the keywords. I seen most of the sites are nofollow which is not useful but for the link diversification is that something good ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chandubaba0