mainhostingacct.com/addondomain/htmlfiles.htm are getting indexed! help

[HughKazoo]

So we have our main domain hosted by bluehost. Love it by the way. Then we have several add-on domains which appear in folders under the main domain, and the websites under development below those, like this:

www.mainhostingacct.com/addondomain/htmlfiles.htm

For some reason, even though I have never put any sort of public link to the add-on domain folders, google is indexing them!

Can someone explain how this is happening and how to prevent it?

[HughKazoo]

Apparently I can't edit my thread here so I'll add more info:

I know once I tie a domain name to these add on domains, google finds them because bluehost publishes regularly a list of all the domains hosted there. So I don't tie a domain name in as an add-on domain until I'm ready to go live.

Also, there is no website on www.mainhostingacct.com and no public links to that either.

EDIT - UPDATE - SOLUTION:

Googling the word addondomain above, shows that a question I asked on webproworld forum, was published in their online newsletter, and google found it. Dang!

[HughKazoo]

As an FYI, I used a new folder for the live files, but kept the old folder, and put a 301 redirect in an .htaccess file containing this info in the root of the old folder:

from http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect (http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php))

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)



Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]



Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com (http://www.newdomain.com) in the above code with your actual domain name.
In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.
Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

[Bob Barr]

I think that you should be able to exclude the development folders with entries in your robots.txt file.

Alternatively, if you set password protection through cPanel, search engines won't be able to access them at all.