Hi all,

Basically i have my website "mysite.com" and i created a customers WordPress website for previewing in a folder that's accessible under my own website "mysite.com/theirsite"

However now their site has been crawled by google and google thinks its part of my website which has completely changed all my keywords on google webmaster tools and indexed over 100 pages as if its associated with my site.

1. Is this a problem for my SEO? (I have moved the address to their domain now however its still in the same folder in my FTP so still accessible by "mysite.com/theirsite" however now just throws up 404 errors.

2. Is there a way to completely disassociate their website with my own?

Very much appreciate any help on the matter.

Thanks.

1. Yes, this will affect your SEO. All those 404 errors will have a negative effect on your ranking.

 

2. You need to set them up as a separate domain so there is no link at all from them to you. cpanel has an 'addon domain' option that will do this for you. All you then need to do is move the whole site into the new domain area.

Ouch mate, that's a pickle right there.

 

Yup, anything on yourdomain.com/something will be attributed to your domain, and yes it'll make a mess of your site-wide keywords, and in addition their new site might be considered 'duplicate' as the content was first found on yourdomain.com/theirfolder.

 

The clients site should always be hosted in their own hosting with root rather than a sub-folder, anything less than this will always leave 'unknown' ways to the site, this can also happen with any type of 'preview' method unless you run a login for preview.

 

2. You need to set them up as a separate domain so there is no link at all from them to you. cpanel has an 'addon domain' option that will do this for you. All you then need to do is move the whole site into the new domain area.

 

... and don't forget once migrated to remove yourdomain.com/theirfolder!

 

All those 404 errors will have a negative effect on your ranking.

 

404s are ok mate, they're exactly what it says on the tin, you've removed a page or folder, not negative on SEO, it's the right server response for this. Soft 404s however do have a negative effect on SEO, but the removal of the folder Apache would 404 correctly.

404s are ok mate, they're exactly what it says on the tin, you've removed a page or folder, not negative on SEO, it's the right server response for this. Soft 404s however do have a negative effect on SEO, but the removal of the folder Apache would 404 correctly.

Indeed. But Google is looking for those page and can't find then so can get quite miffed. A proper migration and a bit of redirection can fix it all though as you suggest.

Indeed. But Google is looking for those page and can't find then so can get quite miffed. A proper migration and a bit of redirection can fix it all though as you suggest.

 

You could 301 yourdomain.com/theirfolder to newdomain.com/ if it's 100% accurate, but my concern would be since the site was in development who knows what paths it has conjured up during development.

 

In future if you're developing on public facing servers make a login for the client to see the development, then when they login give them a session of say $_SESSION['beta']=1. Now you can beta lock their site.

session_start();
function betaOnly($var) {
  if($var!=1) {
    header('HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found');
    include("/path/to/404/404.php");
    exit();
  }
}
betaOnly(intval($_SESSION['beta']));

This will 404 anything when they're not logged in.

Ah thanks so much for the help both of you! The thing is now i have actually set it up as an addon domain with its own domain but it's still accessible through the mysite.com/theirsite.

I use deluxe shared hosting for all my sites currently mine and 4 clients, should each client have their own separate hosting?

I think i may have everything set up wrong in my FTP because i have found all my sites are accessible through mysite.com/theirfoldername, although only 1 has been crawled by google and associated with my website.

I have attached a screenshot my website is just in the public_html folder and clients sites are in folders in this section, is this an incorrect setup that is causing the problems? And how do i solve this, or is the only way with separate hosting?



Thanks again for the feedback.

Move each site into their own addon domains and delete the folders form your sites.

 

Or better still get each client to pay for their own hosting.

If you want to make it for the sake of review client website(how it will look like) then, its ok. What you have to do just go to your robots.txt file and disallow your client page like "/clientsite" and upload, rest leave on google, crawler will not index all those pages.

A lot of this has been covered already in this thread, but my advice for you would be 3 simple steps...

 

1. Move all of your clients' staging content to another domain.

 

2. Disallow robots.txt for the entire staging domain *and* put a no-index tag on any public pages (even if you're not linking to them anywhere). Preferably password protect each site you're staging (would negate the need for robots.txt / no-index which are imperfect anyways)

 

3. For the pages that were already indexed, I would just 301 those to the clients' production sites. That's the best thing for the client

 

As for cleaning up Google's perception of your site, the 301s should fix that over time (e.g. your site won't rank for those terms any more). Perhaps someone knows some better Google Search Console tricks to speed that up, but they'll figure it out naturally after you put in the 301s.

 

Good luck!

I use deluxe shared hosting for all my sites currently mine and 4 clients, should each client have their own separate hosting?

 

I think i may have everything set up wrong in my FTP because i have found all my sites are accessible through mysite.com/theirfoldername, although only 1 has been crawled by google and associated with my website.

 

I have attached a screenshot my website is just in the public_html folder and clients sites are in folders in this section, is this an incorrect setup that is causing the problems? And how do i solve this, or is the only way with separate hosting?

 

Definitely move everything to their own hosting space, this stops crawlers finding via yourdomain.com and also should you fall out with a client it's easier to migrate if they don't have access to the rest of your sites.

 

Separate hosting simply means no 2 sites share the same public_html or www folder. I would suggest looking at multi site hosting, either via VPS and cpanel (if you know your chips) else something like https://www.tsohost.com/web-hosting/reseller-hosting (doesn't have to be TSO before I take a beating!), either way you 'create a hosting package' for each clients project.