There is a discussion at WebmasterWorld started by a Bluehost user who suddenly discovered that his primary domain had many subdomains indexed by Google — subdomains he didn’t know existed. Despite all the replies the user received, the correct solution has yet to surface in the discussion (as I write this).
The problem is created by the way CPanel handles ADDON domains. In fact, the Web hosting provider has some control over that because some Web hosts don’t create this issue with their CPANEL configurations, but Bluehost and a few others do. Fortunately, you can now go into CPANEL and tell it NOT to show those subdomains.
The subdomains are annoying but usually no one sees them or knows about them. The search engines will only discover them through accidental linkage, perhaps only links found on the Websites themselves.
When you sign up with Bluehost for shared hosting they will ask you to assign a PRIMARY domain to your account. All the files associated with your Web hosting account will be associated with this one domain. In other words, your server account will have only one folder that Apache Web Server uses as the home for your Website content. That folder is named “public_html” on the Web hosting accounts I have access to.
The default or account root “public_html” folder is the main folder for your PRIMARY domain. When you start adding successive domains to your hosting (the ADDON domains) each one is assigned a folder within that “public_html” folder. The Web Server doesn’t care where your files are hosted.
If you’re thinking, “But someone could look at those folders without going to the ADDON domains…” well, yes, that can be a problem. If you have WordPress installed in the root folder of an ADDON domain it will redirect the user to the domain; if you don’t have WordPress (or a similarly capable CMS) installed someone will see your ADDON Website as if it’s a folder on the PRIMARY Website.
You can implement a 301-redirect for each ADDON domain’s folder in your PRIMARY domain’s “.htaccess” and that will fix the subfolder issue. WordPress may try to have the visitor login if it handles the redirect, so it would be better if you do the redirect yourself.
In CPANEL itself, under the SUBDOMAINS administration panel, you can use the built-in “REDIRECT” function to tell the service to redirect traffic from SUBDOMAIN.PRIMARY to ADDON. Problem solved.
In the past, before this CPANEL option became available, I simply advised people to “burn” the PRIMARY domain. That is, never use it. Block robots from crawling it, don’t link to it, etc. People hated this because it added an extra expense to their hosting fees and often their PRIMARY domains are the most important ones to them.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
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