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

[Motava]

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.

[Motava]

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!

[ChristopherGlaeser]

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

[Motava]

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]

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

[Motava]

The other domains are ours, yes.

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

[Chris.Menke]

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

[customerparadigm.com]

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.