: Robots.txt for website hosted in a subdirectory I have 2 website which is hosted in a shared hosting. 1st website example.com hosted in a root directory as /public_html/ 2nd website example2.com

@Jamie184

It appears that for cPanel, and perhaps others, certainly to be expected with web hosts these days, while creating a second or third web site or even a sub-domain, cPanel in order to save on setting file permissions, creates any additional site within the web space of the first site created. This may be a result of the old Apache schema using httpd.conf and compatibility. Who knows? The result is that there is confusion and potential problems that can arise.

/public_html/ is the original sites web space for example.com

/public_html/example_2/ is the second site for example2.com

For example.com, the directory directive within the configuration file points to /public_html/ and for example2.com, the directory directive within the configuration file points to /public_html/example_2/.

These are local directories on your file system and not how things are seen from the web.

What is put into /public_html/ such as index.html will be seen as example.com/index.html and what is put into /public_html/example_2/ such as index.html will be seen as example2.com/index.html.

The same will be true for robots.txt and any .htaccess file you choose to create. Example.com robots.txt would go into /public_html/ and example2.com robots.txt would go into /public_html/example_2/.

The drawback to this configuration is that example.com/example_2/index.html will show the sites home page for example2.com/index.html. This is generally not a problem. Just something to remember.

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