Some cPanel login pages appear indexed in Google

[webado]

Sorry if this may have already been asked and answered, but I couldn't find anything about it.

Recently I have noticed that Google has somehow managed to find and index some cPanel login pages such as:

http://www.example.com:2082/unprotected/loader.html

I find those doing a site: query in Google for some domains of mine.

Actually you can find loads of those with a simple search:
"Click Here to load cPanel" - Google Search



I notice that such a page does not have a robots noindex meta tag and there is no robots.txt file at http://www.example.com:2082/robots.txt .

I can't seem able to do anything about this myself. My own website's .htaccess file does not influence accesses on port 2082 in any way. I have no means to block such a url from being crawled and indexed by search engines.

I feels like it's also a security risk, despite there being a password requirement of course in order to log in. Still, I don't appreciate my cPanel login page being indexed for all to see when searching my site.


Is there any solution to this that I may have missed?

Thanks for any tips.

[cPanelDavidG]

Originally Posted by webado

Sorry if this may have already been asked and answered, but I couldn't find anything about it.

Recently I have noticed that Google has somehow managed to find and index some cPanel login pages such as:


I find those doing a site: query in Google for some domains of mine.

Actually you can find loads of those with a simple search:
"Click Here to load cPanel" - Google Search



I notice that such a page does not have a robots noindex meta tag and there is no robots.txt file at http://www.example.com:2082/robots.txt .

I can't seem able to do anything about this myself. My own website's .htaccess file does not influence accesses on port 2082 in any way. I have no means to block such a url from being crawled and indexed by search engines.

I feels like it's also a security risk, despite there being a password requirement of course in order to log in. Still, I don't appreciate my cPanel login page being indexed for all to see when searching my site.


Is there any solution to this that I may have missed?

Thanks for any tips.

Do you happen to have root access to the server on which your website resides? If so you can SSH in and add a robots.txt file to

/usr/local/cpanel/base/unprotected/

Let me know if that resolves the issue.

[webado]

Thanks David. Personally I cannto do it but I know somebody who could.

However the robots.txt file should be in the root folder - and accessible at http://www.example.com:2082/robots.txt . It serves no purpose at all if it's in the folder /unprotected/ . Unless /usr/local/cpanel/base/unprotected/ actually corresponds to http://www.example.com:2082/ .

Also robots noindex meta tags ought to be added to the head section of all those pages.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive">

That should take care of everything.

I think this is something only you guys can (dare I say should?) do .

Thanks for your help.

[cPanelDavidG]

Originally Posted by webado

Thanks David. Personally I cannto do it but I know somebody who could.

However the robots.txt file should be in the root folder - and accessible at http://www.example.com:2082/robots.txt . It serves no purpose at all if it's in the folder /unprotected/ . Unless /usr/local/cpanel/base/unprotected/ actually corresponds to Example Web Page .

Also robots noindex meta tags ought to be added to the head section of all those pages.



That should take care of everything.

I think this is something only you guys can (dare I say should?) do .

Thanks for your help.

Actually, with the way our login themes work, the files in unprotected/ are the root directory of the cPanel and WHM ports.

My problem is being unable to replicate the issue you are experiencing. None of the sites I have access to have their cPanel/WHM/Webmail interfaced indexed by Google. Even though, practically speaking, inserting a robots.txt in the cPanel, WHM and Webmail interfaces should stop the spidering and remove that content, it's best to confirm this to be the case before I submit a proposal to our developers.

[webado]

That's why I gave this search: "Click Here to load cPanel" - Google Search


You will see a ton are indexed.



You can find an instance from one of my sites near the bottom of these search results: site:melinas-music.com - Recherche Google


Many other sites too.

[webado]

Not sure what happened to my earlier post - it seemed to go into moderation.

URLs like what I described are mot definitely getting indexed in Google.

I found at least one for one of my websites. The quesiotn how Google found such a link is a little mystery in itself, because I have never posted any such url. But it did find it. And indexed it.

You can see one such url indexed if you lok at the search results for this site query:

site:melinas-music.com - Google Search


It's the last one before the omitted results.

[cpanelben]

I've committed a change to prevent the indexing. After some review, this change will propagate to all versions.

[webado]

Originally Posted by cpanelben

I've committed a change to prevent the indexing. After some review, this change will propagate to all versions.

Thank you so very much

This will be a fantastic help.