• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4
        8
        2273
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • Motava
          Motava Subscriber last edited by

          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.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Motava
            Motava Subscriber last edited by

            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!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • ChristopherGlaeser
              ChristopherGlaeser @Motava last edited by

              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

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Motava
                Motava Subscriber last edited by

                Thanks for the replies, guys. We are going to try Christopher's suggestion first and we'll update the question when it's resolved!

                ChristopherGlaeser 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • ChristopherGlaeser
                  ChristopherGlaeser last edited by

                  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

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • Motava
                    Motava Subscriber @Chris.Menke last edited by

                    The other domains are ours, yes.

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

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • Chris.Menke
                      Chris.Menke last edited by

                      Are those other domains also yours, by any chance and/or is this a Joomla cms?

                      Motava 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • customerparadigm.com
                        customerparadigm.com last edited by

                        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.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • 1 / 1
                        • First post
                          Last post

                        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.

                        • See all categories

                        Related Questions

                        • SEOhmygod

                          Does content revealed by a 'show more' button get crawled by Google?

                          I have a div on my website with around 500 words of unique content in, automatically when the page is first visited the div has a fixed height of 100px, showing a couple of hundred words and fading out to white, with a show more button, which when clicked, increases the height to show the full content. My question is, does Google crawl the content in that div when it renders the page? Or disregard it? Its all in the source code. Or worse, do they consider this cloaking or hidden content? It is only there to make the site more useable for customers, so i don't want to get penalised for it. Cheers

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOhmygod
                          0
                        • Max_

                          One of my Friend's website Domain Authority is Reducing? What could be the reason?

                          Hello Guys, One of my friend's website domain authority is decreasing since they have moved their domain from HTTP to https. 
                          There is another problem that his blog is on subfolder with HTTP.
                          So, can you guys please tell me how to fix this issue and also it's losing some of the rankings like 2-5 positions down. Here is website URL: myfitfuel.in/
                          here is the blog URL: myfitfuel.in/mffblog/

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max_
                          0
                        • kevinliao

                          What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?

                          We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao
                          0
                        • mark_baird

                          Do Q&A 's work for SEO

                          If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird
                          0
                        • rayvensoft

                          Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?

                          Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use.  The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site.  The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files.  So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site.   So do I get any benefit from these great links?  If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them.  Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
                          0
                        • RichBestSEO

                          Is there any negative SEO effect of having comma's in URL's?

                          Hello, I have a client who has a large ecommerce website. Some category names have been created with comma's in - which has meant that their software has automatically generated URL's with comma's in for every page that comes beneath the category in the site hierarchy. eg. 1 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/ eg. 2 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/action-and-adventure/ etc... I know that URL's with comma's in look a bit ugly! But is there 'any' SEO reason why URL's with comma's in are any less effective? Kind Regs, RB

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichBestSEO
                          0
                        • MTalhaImtiaz

                          How to check a website's architecture?

                          Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz
                          0
                        • JamesO

                          To subnav or NOT to subnav... that's my question.... :)

                          We are working on a new website that is golf related and wondering about whether or not we should set up a subnavigation dropdown menu from the main menu. For example: GOLF PACKAGES
                            >> 2 Round Packages
                            >> 3 Round Packages
                            >> 4 Round Packages
                            >> 5 Round Packages GOLF COURSES
                            >> North End Courses
                            >> Central Courses
                            >> South End Courses This would actually be very beneficial to our users from a usability standpoint, BUT what about from an SEO standpoint? Is diverting all the link juice to these inner pages from the main site navigation harmful?  Should we just create a page for GOLF PACKAGES and break it down on that page?

                          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
                          0

                        Get started with Moz Pro!

                        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                        Start my free trial
                        Products
                        • Moz Pro
                        • Moz Local
                        • Moz API
                        • Moz Data
                        • STAT
                        • Product Updates
                        Moz Solutions
                        • SMB Solutions
                        • Agency Solutions
                        • Enterprise Solutions
                        • Digital Marketers
                        Free SEO Tools
                        • Domain Authority Checker
                        • Link Explorer
                        • Keyword Explorer
                        • Competitive Research
                        • Brand Authority Checker
                        • Local Citation Checker
                        • MozBar Extension
                        • MozCast
                        Resources
                        • Blog
                        • SEO Learning Center
                        • Help Hub
                        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                        • How-to Guides
                        • Moz Academy
                        • API Docs
                        About Moz
                        • About
                        • Team
                        • Careers
                        • Contact
                        Why Moz
                        • Case Studies
                        • Testimonials
                        Get Involved
                        • Become an Affiliate
                        • MozCon
                        • Webinars
                        • Practical Marketer Series
                        • MozPod
                        Connect with us

                        Contact the Help team

                        Join our newsletter
                        Moz logo
                        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                        • Accessibility
                        • Terms of Use
                        • Privacy

                        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.