Keep physical hosting domain from being indexed?

[php4U]

Maybe I am thinking about this too much, but I haven't run into this scenario before. I talked to a potential client today who has a domain name registered through one company, and it is forwarding to a hosting plan with another company. If I did something like www.mysite.com/clientsite where clientsite contained the whole client site and www.clientsite.com forwards to my server what would keep robots from picking up the clientsite folder on my domain name since it is phyically sitting on mysite.com?

In other words the clientsite.com would be the only thing that should be referenced to /clientsite. mysite.com shouldn't be associated with it at all because it is only the domain name where the physical folder resides.

Like I said maybe I am thinking about this too much, but if someone goes to www.mysite.com/clientsite they will see the client site or if they visit www.clientsite.com they will see the same site. (URL masking applies to his domain name forward so the physical folder name /clientsite won't be seen. I wouldn't want to block the /clientsite folder from being indexed because those will be his physical pages...any ideas to not index mysite.com/clientsite? Thanks...time for some sleep :)

[edited by: php4U at 6:23 am (utc) on Oct. 7, 2007]

[vincevincevince]

Put /clientside above your document root and assign its own document root entry correctly so that becomes the only way to access that data.

[php4U]

Thank you vincevincevince,

Looking at all the folders in the document root "/" most of them are assigned to a physical domain name. The few that are not assigned to any domain and are just sitting in the root can be accessed like 11.22.33.44/foldername This should work to point his domain name to the folder like this, or I can explore the specific directory options once the domain is pointed to my hosting name servers when the switch is ready to happen.

[edited by: php4U at 9:16 pm (utc) on Oct. 7, 2007]

[vincevincevince]

Your server is probably set up something like this:

/var/www/sites/domain1.foo/
/var/www/sites/domain2.foo/
/var/www/sites/domain3.foo/

Most are...

If you have domain1.foo, then to add a new site, don't map the document root to /var/www/sites/domain1.foo/clientsite/ - instead - map it to /var/www/sites/clientsite/

Hope that makes sense.

i.e. there is no good reason that one document root should be within another document root - move it higher in the server directory hierarchy until you put it beside the document root of 11.22.33.44.

[php4U]

What you are saying makes since because another site I work on has all the files contained within the httpdocs folder (same principle). Most are configured the way you mentioned, but mine seems to be configured a little different which is what was throwing me off since I have never dealt with DNS forwarding on such a configuration. When I FTP I only get a doc root / where all files and folders are stored. Through my control panel I "point" my domain names to the specific directory with those files.

I found out that what I need to do is to add this domain to my control panel as an "external" domain which my control panel allows. From there I can point this external domain to the folder on my hosting, and the rest is simply changing the DNS info with register.com.

I appreciate your advise and help.