Joomla Website Creating Automatic Unwanted Subdomains

Question

Suddenly we are facing this strange issue. Our problem is that, lately Google has started indexing subdomain (mail.raunakgroup.com) instead for our original/main domain (http://raunakgroup.com). All the internal links are having the very same issue with the extra sub domain "mail" added to them.

We have separate url for mail logins & these sub domains were never really created by us & are completely redundant. Everything was almost fine, until 2 days back when we figured this whole issue. We are afraid that if we do not fix this issue, it's going to hurt our SEO rankings soon. How can we remove all the sub domains url's from Google index so that our main domain comes up in search results & how did it get there at the first place.

This is more of a cry for help. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

The issue that you are having is in relation to cPanel and your web host. Typically a default install of a cPanel hosting account will setup various services that can be accessed by your domain. Often mail. or webmail. are automatically added to the DNS records and will route users that access these sub domains to the webmail portal.

In your case the hosting server uses: mail. and you can confirm this by navigating your browser to the following URL: https://mail.hafoos.com:2083/. Normally accessing mail. on port 80 or 463 will redirect the user to port 2083 and this is something your server is not doing.

If you have an WHM account then you can modify the ZONE file records and simply remove mail 1200 A 108.161.134.167 and this will stop Google or anyone else being able to access that sub domain.

Most often users will use a standard cPanel account which does not have any option to allow you to edit the zone file, if this is the case then you need to contact your web host and have them either:

• Fix the redirect from port 80/443 to 2083.
• Delete the A record mail within your local DNS zone file.