google indexing mail.url.co.uk

[Phoenix164]

I have noticed a few of my google results are showing up as mail.url.co.uk instead of the usual www.url.co.uk. Clicking the link takes me to the correct page. Has anyone seen this before and how do I stop it.

Thanks

[TraceyHand]

Must be using it somewhere on site, I guess.
Do you have a mixture of URLs in your network settings, perhaps?

If you post your network settings here (export as .txt, copy and paste here, removing username/passwords) maybe something there is amiss?

[Phoenix164]

I have checked the network settings and there is no reference to mail.av4home.co.uk

[Duncan Rounding]

It may be just down to Google indexing for some reason. I would give it a few days or so and then see if it's still an issue.

[Phoenix164]

I have spoken to actinic and they cannot find any reference to mail.av4home.co.uk on the site at all. I have done a site:mail.av4home.co.uk and it returns 138 results.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Currently actinic, our hosts and I are stumped

[Duncan Rounding]

Have you checked your htaccess file or other host redirections?
I see that any subdomain will resolve to your site (such as fred.av4home.co.uk)

[Phoenix164]

There is no reference to mail.av4home.co.uk in the htaccess.

The only unusual thing in there is a piece of code to change the robots.txt file depending on whether the site is accessed using http or https. I added this because I was having a similar problem a few months ago when I started noticing google was indexing https pages from the website.

We do have ssl but it is only used in the checkout

Code below

**

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$
RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots_ssl.txt

**

[Phoenix164]

**
I see that any subdomain will resolve to your site (such as fred.av4home.co.uk)
**

Do you think that this is bad practice?

[Duncan Rounding]

Well if it didn't resolve then you would get 404 errors on the links and they would disappear from Google quite quickly - as it is they may not.

[Phoenix164]

Host-it are telling me that our dns a records include mail. and they also have a *. entry. Meaning that someone can type in fish.av4home.co.uk and be redirected to our site.

They advise that *. entry is left to catch customers who type in the address wrong. Not sure if this is really necessary as it would only catch people that cant manage to type www. (so i believe)

I dont think that I have referenced mail.av4home.co.uk anywhere on the site and i think that it has been linked on another site.

I would appreciate some thoughts on this matter

[Duncan Rounding]

It certainly came from somewhere - probably mistyped and then indexed on from that. If you don't stop the catchall now it will may well happen again in the future too.

[Mike Hughes]

You could use Google webmaster tools to tell Google that your preferred prefix is www. That might solve it.

Mike

[Phoenix164]

I was contemplating this, in your opinion would google steadily reduce the number of urls listed as mail. and instead start listing the www. ones instead.

Any downsides to this method?

[Mike Hughes]

I haven't used it for mail. prefixes but it should remove them. Whether it will add the www. ones intsead I don't know but it should do.

I'm not aware of any downsides to doing this. It's what you should be doing already.

Mike

[Darren B]

you might be able stick it in your htaccess to block this url, your need to read up on the exact format, if possible also look at google webmast tools to see if you can add something there

mail is normally used when you use webmail or something similar, your mx records are mail.av4home.co.uk this is not that uncommon. if people here try they will find that their website probably does the same, just yours has been indexed