I just discovered a neat trick.

Edit: Aaaarrrgh, I just redirected my cpanel.myanimeclub.net to my forum's home page using this trick. Do not use this trick until I figure out how to ensure that my cPanel subdomain points to my cPanel login page. I just emailed my webhost so I'll post feedback soon. Perhaps adding cpanel.myanimeclub.net as an individual subdomain first before using the wildcard subdomain would have prevented this.

Rather than try to set up a whole list of alias's to use for the subforums mod, I just created a wildcard alias, which causes any random subdomain typed into the URL bar to point to the root domain.

My site is http://myanimeclub.net. Just add any prefix to my main domain, then try navigating to it using your browser (e.g. http://x.myanimeclub.net or http://z.myanimeclub.net)

First I set up a single alias (za.myanimeclub.net since za is the code for my country, South Africa) to test out the mod, but then after reading up on wildcards, I decided to give it a try.



To do it, I logged into my cPanel (which is free with my webhost, and includes all the advanced features), and created a Subdomain titled

*.myanimeclub.net

(i.e. the asterix * is a wildcard which means it represents any, and every word)

then I ensured that the subdomain pointed to my website root

/public_html



I've only added za.myanimeclub.net and us.myanimeclub.net to my Subforums manager so far, so only those would show up as subforums, however the other subdomains should all take you to my homepage.

I repeat, Aaaarrrgh, I just redirected my cpanel.myanimeclub.net to my forum's home page using this trick. Do not use this trick until I figure out how to ensure that my cPanel subdomain points to my cPanel login page. I just emailed my webhost so I'll post feedback soon. Perhaps adding cpanel.myanimeclub.net as an individual subdomain first before using the wildcard subdomain would have prevented this.

yourdomain.com/cpanel do not work?

I tried that for a while (well, I did it using the A records, o something similar... on the dns editor of a VPS... maybe it is the same, but you did on the cpanel...)... and then I realized that this trick will generate duplicated content...?
For example, some day you write a review pointing to http://ymaniemculb.net (a drunken night)... then google reach it... and... there you have... a whole duplicate of your website, indexed at google

So... I have erased the * wildcard... and created A records for each subdomain needed

Ah, thanks. I hadn't thought to try myanimeclub.net/cpanel. At least now I can login and change things back. More feedback to come.

Yes, but search engines will only crawl it if that specific subdomain has inbound links, like in a sitemap, or a link that someone posted on the internet. For example, Google won't, or rather, can't crawl an arbitrary subdomain that nobody's linked to. Unless someone misspells a subdomain.

Also, I think you're underestimating search engines, specifically Google, which is really the most important one. They're really cleverly designed, in that they (or at least Google) can decide reasonably whether websites which have duplicated content should be treated as separate websites or rather, as extensions of the same website. Consequently, they treat different cases of duplicated content in different ways.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think you're jumping too quickly to conclusions. For example, some sites use subdomains to represent certain geographical locations, just like I have done, and these different subdomains all have almost the same content, with the only exception that they serve different groups of people.