Shared hosting Keywords getting mixed

[chicagojoe]

Ok, this may be a little technical. It just relates to shared hosting and how my sites are being indexed together. As a result one site is getting indexed for keywords from another site. I'm just looking for a way to fix this. Here is more detail.

All of my sites are through 1 hosting account I have with Bluehost. There is one main site (called mainsite.com) and several other addon sites (addonSite1.com, addonSite2.com, etc...). So, I can manage all of my sites with 1 hosting account. Each site has it's own domain name. This is a very inexpensive way to go. I realize I'd get better SEO by splitting them up, but this is cost effective for managing several startup sites that aren't making money yet.

The way this appears in the main site's directory on the server is like this:

www.mainsite.com/addonsite1.com/
www.mainsite.com/addonsite2.com/

etc...

As I noted above, each addonsite has its own domain name (which really redirects to a sub-directory of mainsite.com).

My issue is that the mainsite is getting indexed within google for keywords from another addon site.

Because..

addonsite1.com/dogfood/

is the same as

mainsite.com/addonsite1.com/dogfood/

Is there a way I can restrict this so that my main site only is indexed with its webpages and not pages from the other sites? I was thinking of using a robots.txt file in mainsite.com to restrict urls, but there are lots of them. I'm not sure what the best practice is for shared hosting like this of if it's even possible to accomplish what I am after using shared hosting.

If anyone has thoughts let me know. Thanks.

[willilance]

Using robots.txt is the only way I know of to block the search engines from indexing certain areas or folders of your site. You can block at the directory level though, so you only need to tell the robots.txt file to ignore www.mainsite.com/addonsite1.com/ and that should fix it for the whole addon site.

I'd also look into how the www.mainsite.com/addonsite1.com/ is getting crawled in the first place as that shouldn't happen with addon domains. Are you submitting a sitemap from mainsite.com that includes those subfolders?