I was doing some web design work for a friend/customer of mine, and he had a Web Hosting account with a company that used cPanel. I’ve used cPanel before, I’ve dabbled in it and fixed problems with it. But never really used it extensively as a client so to speak. Anyways, included in the customers Web Hosting package was 20 Addon Domains. What are “Addon Domains”?
Basically it allows you to run mutiple websites off your single account/domain name. Brilliant idea, if it was done properly. When you add an Addon Domain, it creates a folder in your main sites public_html folder, typically its name is that of your domain name. Lets just say that my customer has two domain names, the main one bob.com and an additional one jill.com
The customer creates jill.com as an Addon Domain, all is swell. Until they find out they can access the addon domain at “jill.com” and “bob.com/jill.com”. Why is this bad? Well google will see it as duplicate conent and your site will either never get indexed or have funky SEO results.
How do you fix it? Change the root directory to not be placed inside the public_html folder and viola, no duplicate content. Also make sure to edit the subdomain to forward to the correct URL as well or more duplicate content will exist.
“Also make sure to edit the subdomain to forward to the correct URL as well or more duplicate content will exist.”
Could you explain this more detailed please.
Kyle, when you create an Addon Domain, a sub-domain is also created. This sub-domain needs to be set to forward with a 301 otherwise Google will see it and get confused or possibly do something that could affect your ranking.
“How do you fix it? Change the root directory to not be placed inside the public_html folder and viola, no duplicate content.”
If you don’t put it in the public_html folder, where do you place it?
The public_html folder is where your site contents go, for instance anything in this folder will be accessible from your website. You should be putting your .htaccess within this folder.
If you don’t put it in the public_html folder, where do you place it?
I just read my response to Ashley. It doesn’t make sense.
Lets just use some example domains. Lets say your main domain name is bob.com and you want to create an addon domain for jim.com
When you create an “Addon Domain” you will be asked for a document root. By default it will be “public_html/jim”. This is a problem, as google will be able to access the content of this folder via bob.com/jim.
To stop this you want to change the “Document Root” to just “/jim” then it won’t be accessible via bob.com/jim and duplicate content will not be seen by Google.