To piggyback on what scodtt wrote:

If we send out a mail campaign and plan on putting the same content in a blog post, then we change the link found in the header of the email to go to the blog post and not the page they create:

Email not displaying correctly?
View it in your browser.

Hit Edit on that portion then edit the link to go to your blog post.

check the image for visuals

eN4RbS4.png

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 SERPS

The 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!

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.

I don't think any of them are using Joomla.

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 TEXT

UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120‎
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2

UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2

UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17‎
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3

ns5.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.

Hi Keri,

No luck with any other tools, unfortunately. It's still something on the to-do list.

Ryan's comment is helpful but still a lot of manual work involved unfortunately.

• Victor

good video!

Definitely going with regular links for this secondary menu

Thanks EGOL, so you see no disadvantage to having this secondary menu?

We have a "secondary main menu" on a site that displays some popular pages of the site. They are in the main navigation of the site as subpages but we wanted to highlight them on every page of the site through this secondary menu. so this secondary menu is the same on every page of the site.

So we have the main menu on the top of the site, subpages on the left and this secondary menu below the subpages (in a blue box so they stand out).

Is this secondary menu confusing for the structure of the site or negative at all (in relation to robots, not UX)? Should we nofollow these links in the secondary menu?

thanks for replies!

Other than typos, 301s for previous links or type-in traffic we have only used a supporting domain for advertisement/other marketing purposes that is catchier than the company name and main URL. This domain just 301s to the main domain.

Something like this can be used in print ads, commercials or billboards to get an idea of the traffic resulting from and subsequent effectiveness of the ad. A similar idea is setup with particular landing pages like www.godaddy.com/superbowl.

Using a different domain for this would not create the best brand recognition for the main URL, however. In our case, it's beneficial to use since the URL is the main slogan of the company as well.

Other than typos, 301s for previous links or type-in traffic we have only used a supporting domain for advertisement/other marketing purposes that is catchier than the company name and main URL. This domain just 301s to the main domain.

Something like this can be used in print ads, commercials or billboards to get an idea of the traffic resulting from and subsequent effectiveness of the ad. A similar idea is setup with particular landing pages like www.godaddy.com/superbowl.

Using a different domain for this would not create the best brand recognition for the main URL, however. In our case, it's beneficial to use since the URL is the main slogan of the company as well.

To piggyback on what scodtt wrote:

If we send out a mail campaign and plan on putting the same content in a blog post, then we change the link found in the header of the email to go to the blog post and not the page they create:

Email not displaying correctly?
View it in your browser.

Hit Edit on that portion then edit the link to go to your blog post.

check the image for visuals

eN4RbS4.png

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 SERPS

The 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!