: Unwanted results in Search Results from Domains we control I'm not sure how to word this. But basically when you search our company's name, some of our clients are coming up in the results.
I'm not sure how to word this. But basically when you search our company's name, some of our clients are coming up in the results. That alone is strange because we don't have any links outbound to them and only one or two inbound from their site to ours. Even stranger is that the links go to broken pages or show meta descriptions for pages that are not on their site.
For example, I search "dubose web" and one of the results is this :
This result is even more skewed:
The title and description is for our FAQ page which we don't even have on our current site (but did on an older version).
the URL for the link is https when there is no SSL for the clients site.
If you click the link it takes you to the typical warning page since no SSL exists and then if you proceed, it takes you to the main domain for this server (desainc.org is a parked domain) which is broken because it's not being used.
desainc.com doesn't have a /faq page and the PHP file is from another site we manage which is not in the sites faq folder. So we have the root domain to one site, the FAQ title/description from another, and PHP file from a third.
What kind of pickle have we fallen in to? Is this because of parked domains (though some of the sites in results are not parked domains and have their own accounts)? Is there some setting on the server we need to set? Is there any way to trace how Google is picking up on these non-existent links?
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Using site:desainc.com in a Google search you can see all the links for this domain. It is only the https links that are the issue, which means that your server has a default SSL certificate pointing at the dubose.com site so any additional domains being hosted on this server and being accessed via https without a dedicated IP & SSL setup for the specific domain will default to the dubose.com site.
Google now tests http pages for the equivalent https link and if available it will index this instead. searchengineland.com/google-to-begin-to-index-https-pages-first-before-http-pages-when-possible-238811
And here is a very important read, a Google press release about their attitude toward https going forward, and one that dictates how we should proceed with the setup SSL if we care about future rankings. Note that they warn against blocking https using robot.txt and recommend that you setup every site to allow https access googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
So it is necessary to ensure that your site works correctly for both http and https. If you don't want it to serve over https, then you will need to ensure your setup reflects this.
To correct this you have 3 options:
If no HTTPS needed: Simplest way you can implement in a couple of minutes...
Setup your htaccess file as follows (using the order that is shown here) and that will force all https requests to the equivalent http link. The additional benefit is that you don' need to spend the time telling Google to remove the existing https links from their index. It will auto redirect and give a 301 error causing Google to change those links to http over time.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ www.example.com/ [R=301,L]
If HTTPS is required on one of the domains hosted on the server you will need to assign that site as the default domain for
https.
If required on more than one site you'll need additional dedicated IPs and trusted certificates to setup each site separately.
The other options is to setup your server with SNI for internal SSL routing using only one certificate.
A quick ahrefs check shows 55 outgoing links to said domain as well as some weird interlinking-profile going on between those domains. Based on that and a hunch that there is some weird server-misconfiguration I checked the below domains with mixed results:
Correct ones
www.desainc.com -> shows www.desainc.com with content from site desainc.com desainc.com -> shows www.desainc.com with content from site desainc.com
Wrong ones
www.desainc.com -> shows desainc.com with content from site duboseweb.com desainc.com -> shows desainc.com with content of duboseweb.com
Basically, this all means that your server setup is somehow wrong and thus Google is picking up wrong content for the wrong domains and may (or may not) even penalize that via duplicate content.
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