Wouldn't it be simpler to use VirtualHost so you only respond with content to requests for your domain?

Then set it up so requests without the domain name get a 301 redirect to the canonical URL.

on Apache, SSL and VirtualHost don't play together.

They do with Apache 2.2.12 or later and any recent browser:

http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/NameBasedSSLVHostsWithSNI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

I'm using SNI on all of my domains, and it works great.

I don't quite understand why this article doesn't recommend using <link rel="canonical" href="..."> as described at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y... (resp. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-...)

Such an easy solution to this problem.

The suggested rewrite rule is even simpler than putting a <link> tag in every page.

Sorry, but the author is disqualified by this sentence:

"Now there were no external links to these AWS subdomains but, being a domain registrar, Google was notified of the new DNS entries and went ahead and indexed loads of pages."

To clarify:

* Google isn't a domain registrar. If they were then one would hope that google.com would be registered under them, not markmonitor.com (a popular corporate registrar)

* The server hostname is a subdomain of amazonaws.com and doesn't require registration.

* In fact, the entire name is autogenerated from the IP address using a simple substitution rule.

* I'm not sure how Google finds these, because their own "what links here" doesn't turn anything up.

* Side note: while searching for backlinks in Google, I noticed that this article seems to have been copypasta'd to a dozen other blogs. That's SEO, baby!

EDIT: Damnit HN, you look like reddit, why can't you use a sane text preprocessor like reddit?

... Google is a registrar and has been since 2005.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/01/31/google_is_now_a...

http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html

Thanks for correcting me, I've never used google apps so I'd never noticed you could register domains there. Personally I'd still register my own domains elsewhere as I've had bad experiences with combined registration and hosting, and even the almighty Google has been known to partake in shenanigans.

In any case I'm pretty sure you don't even have to be a registrar to get lists of newly registered domains, not that it matters because the rest of my post addresses why registration has nothing to do with this.

* Google isn't a domain registrar. If they were then one would hope that google.com would be registered under them, not markmonitor.com (a popular corporate registrar) As pointed out, Google is a domain registrar - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/01/google_domain_seller...

The server hostname is a subdomain of amazonaws.com and doesn't require registration. * In fact, the entire name is autogenerated from the IP address using a simple substitution rule.

I don't have technical answers to these

* I'm not sure how Google finds these, because their own "what links here" doesn't turn anything up. Google has a tonne of ways we don't know about for finding domains, there is at least one case I've seen where a deep URL has been indexed after only a mention in gmail

* Side note: while searching for backlinks in Google, I noticed that this article seems to have been copypasta'd to a dozen other blogs. That's SEO, baby!

Thats actually content scraping and aggregation, SEOMoz has a tendancy to get there articles ripped off with much haste and from 150+ blogs (I have been mentioned in them a few times and they always set my Google Alerts wacky)

Which brings up a good point: how _does_ google find these domains? Are they just blindly scanning the entire IP block?

It's possible another user of that DNS name (they do get reused) linked to it at some point and Google picked it up.

"Now there were no external links to these AWS subdomains but, being a domain registrar, Google was notified of the new DNS entries and went ahead and indexed loads of pages"

Domain registrars wouldn't be notified of new RR's inside a second-level domain - that would be pointless.

I can't see any way they would ever index a URL that used a dns RR that was brand new - I'd hazard a guess that either the URL was used previously within the cloud and published somewhere, or it was set up as a CNAME in your own DNS, or your main webserver returned it as a response to a googlebot in some fashion at some point.

I think we would all be better off just using an elastic ip address, and not using the dynamic address for public websites.

Also, the same problem applies to normal servers where the webserver is configured to show the website for the ip address, kind of like:

http://174.132.225.106/

which google also has picked up:

http://www.google.dk/search?q=site:174.132.225.106

Every website should have a similar redirect rule in there somewhere (I implement it in PHP). If someone hits yoursite.com, you probably want to redirect them to www.yoursite.com. I whitelist my domains such that if someone goes goes to anything that points to my server and isn't a valid subdomain, they get redirected to www.

Horseshit. Learn to configure your webserver.

If accessing your web server via .amazonaws.com does not make sense for you, why not just block (whether 403 or 404) all HTTP requests with a Host: *.amazonaws.com header, rather than messing around with rewrites and robots.txt?

Because once that content is indexed, you can receive a negative effect from Google by mass 403-ing a huge amount of content

301 then it if this applies to you. It's still the same solution.

No its not. Google has said that in situations like this, use a 301 redirect to properly tell them where the actual content is located. Using a 403 is an error page that will tell the spiders that that page doesn't exist anymore, and that can have a negative impact on your rankings