Forums/Bugs & Fixes

Subdomains are no longer indexed by search engines

Michael Slater
posted this on December 20, 2010, 09:54

A number of users have reported that their sites are getting indexed by Google not only at their full domain names, but also at their subdomains (yourdomain.webvanta.com). This is undesirable because it creates duplicate content in Google's eyes.

To prevent this, we now deliver a "disallow all" robots.txt file to all subdomain accesses. This means that only sites at full domains will be indexed by search engines. (Note that it may take some time for content that is already indexed to be removed from the search engines.)

One side effect of this is that free sites, which cannot use a full domain name, will not be indexed. If you want your site to be found via search, you will need a paid plan.