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I host my website on Azure and I have recently activated a feature to make it possible for me to directly access each server instance in our web farm by a port number. For example http://example.com:10015 and http://example.com:10016.

I'm a bit nervous of duplicated content in Google and I do not want Google to detect these URLs in some way and start to index them. I recently had this problem with Azure's default cloudapp.net domains and I have now both added a 301 for this domain and also a robots.txt rewrite so I disallow bots for this domain.

I wanted to use a robots.txt rewrite rule for the different ports as well but it doesn't seems to work for some reason. I don't know if it has to do with Azure's handling, but for example the SERVER_PORT variable is returning port 80 even if I go the to port 10015.

Anyhow, I was just trying to add my site with a port specification in Google Webmaster Tools, but that didn't work. So basically my question is if I have to worry about this at all, does Google even treat different ports as different sites?

dan
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Olaj
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1 Answers1

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Does Google even treat different ports as different sites?

Yes. Google can and does index URLs with non-standard ports, as relayed here by Google's Matt Cutts, and also confirmed in a comment to this answer here on our site by Google's John Mueller: Yep, we can index sites on IP addresses and/or on non-standard ports.

I'm a bit nervous of duplicated content in Google

If these different URLs return the same content, then you can indicate to Google which is the preferred URL for your content to index by using a canonical link. As indicated there by Google:

To address these issues, we recommend you define a canonical URL for content (or equivalent content) available through multiple URLs.

Community
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dan
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    Thanks! I have canonicals for my https mirror I just remembered so I guess I will just use the same. – Olaj Feb 20 '15 at 08:12