Wrong domain prefix appearing on Joomla site pages

Question

Google is indexing my site pages with the wrong domain prefix.

My site pages should be fetched as www.topspeedracer.com/url.html instead of mail.topspeedracer.com/url.html

Here is an example of the problem:

http://mail.topspeedracer.com/better-gas-mileage-in-summer-than-winter.html

The domain prefix should always be "www" but occasionally it is "mail" instead.

This problem started happening recently but I have made no changes to my site or server.

What is causing this and how do I fix it?

I am using Joomla version 1.5.9 in legacy mode 1.0

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Since you asked about Google...

The article really seems to cover everything I could think of. To avoid this being just a link, I'll pick one important part from there. Use a 301 redirect in .htaccess to redirect mail. addresses to www. addresses.

You can actually modify the general non-www to www rule I copied from the web:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

This checks if the host does not start with the www prefix and if it doesn't adds the www. In your case that would result in www.mail. prefix so replace the second line with

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www\.topspeedracer\.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You already know what the address is, so you don't need to use a variable. Add somewhere between Rewrite Engine On and the Joomla sef rewrite rules.

I have no real experience with .htaccess, so the rules might have errors. The basic idea of doing a 301 redirect is what you want, though.