Getting subdomains unindexed
-
If i turn an application off displaying a 503 error will that get my site unindexed from search engines?
-
Subdomains can be verified as their own site in GWT. Verify the subdomain in GWT, then put a robots.txt on that subdomain excluding the entire subdomain, then request removal in GWT of that entire subdomain. I've had to remove staging and dev sites a couple of times myself.
A couple of things I've found useful in this situation is to make the robots.txt files for both the dev and live sites read only, so you don't accidentally overwrite one with the other when pushing a site live. You can also sign up for a free tool like Pole Position's Code Monitor that will look at the code of a page (including your robots.txt url) once a day and email you if there are any changes so you can fix the file then go hunt down whoever changed the file.
-
GWT was the first placed i checked unfortunately you can only remove directories or pages. I need entire subdomained sites to be removed (in fact they shouldn't of been indexed in the first place).
We use subdomains for our development testing environment when creating client sites and once the site is approved we push it live replacing the old site. Somehow these testing sites are getting indexed and it may pose a threat to duplicate content on different domains. So i am trying to find a solution to get the subdomains (100's of them) unindexed.
I understand a 301 redirect is best but that isn't really applicable since these test sites still need to be reached by clients.
-
With a robots.txt blocking it, you can then go into Google Webmaster Tools and request removal of that particular page or folder from Google's index.
-
No index tag on it works, and putting up a robots.txt that disallows everyone should work as well.
-
Thanks for the quick reply, i will have to try that. Essentially i am trying to get the site un-indexed but i wasn't sure if a 503 would do the trick.
-
Eventually, but that's the code Google recommends to return when your site is having downtime, so I would expect them to be more lenient towards not removing things right away. I wouldn't expect it to be as efficient as returning a 404 or a 410.
The best way to get content de-indexed is to return a page with a meta noindex tag on it, if you're really keen on getting it removed immediately.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Blogs Not Getting Indexed Intermittently - Why?
Over the past 5 months many of our clients are having indexing issues for their blog posts.
Technical SEO | | JohnBracamontes
A blog from 5 months ago could be indexed, and a blog from 1 month ago could be indexed but blogs from 4, 3 and 2 months ago aren't indexed. It isn't consistent and there is not commonality across all of these clients that would point to why this is happening. We've checked sitemap, robots, canonical issues, internal linking, combed through Search Console, run Moz reports, run SEM Rush reports (sorry Moz), but can't find anything. We are now manually submitting URLs to be indexed to try and ensure they get into the index. Search console reports for many of the URLs will show that the blog has been fetched and crawled, but not indexed (with no errors). In some cases we find that the blog paginated pages (i.e. blog/page/2 , blog/page/3 , etc.) are getting indexed but not the blogs themselves. There aren't any nofollow tags on the links going to the blogs either. Any ideas? *I've added a screenshot of one of the URL inspection reports from Search Console alt text0 -
How to sunset language subdomains that we don't want to support anymore?
We have a primary domain www.postermywall.com. We have used subdomains for offering the same site in different languages, like es.postermywall.com, fr.postermywall.com etc. There are certain language subdomains that have low traffic and are expensive to get translated. We have decided to sunset 3 subdomains that match that criteria. What is the best way of going about removing those subdomains? Should we just redirect from those subdomains to www.postermywall.com? Would that have any negative impact on our primary domain in Google's eye etc.? Anything other than a redirect that we should be considering?
Technical SEO | | 250mils0 -
Blocking subdomains with Robots.txt file
We noticed that Google is indexing our pre-production site ibweb.prod.interstatebatteries.com in addition to indexing our main site interstatebatteries.com. Can you all help shed some light on the proper way to no-index our pre-prod site without impacting our live site?
Technical SEO | | paulwatley0 -
Subdomain/subfolder question
Hi community, Let's say I have a men's/women's clothing website. Would it be better to do clothing.com/mens and clothing.com/womens OR mens.clothing.com and womens.clothing.com? I understand Moz's stance on blogs that it should be clothing.com/blog, but wanted to ask for this different circumstance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Best Way To Clean Up Unruly SubDomain?
Hi, I have several subdomains that present no real SEO value, but are being indexed. They don't earn any backlinks either. What's the best way of cleaning them up? I was thinking the following: 1. Verify them all in Webmaster Tools. 2. Remove all URLs from the index via the Removal Tool in WMT 3. Add site-wide no-index, follow directive. Also, to remove the URLs in WMT, you usually have to block the URLs via /robots.txt. If I'd like to keep Google crawling through the subdomains and remove their URLs, is there a way to do so?
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
How to get rid of duplicate content
I have duplicate content that looks like http://deceptionbytes.com/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&link=932fea0640143bf08fe157d3570792a56dcc1284 - however I have 50 of these all with different numbers on the end. Does this affect the search engine optimization and how can I disallow this in my robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | Mishelm1 -
Why isnt my Site getting Re Crawled !!!
The last crawl for my website was done long back ! What is the use if you dont re-crawl ? My website is www.caraccessoriesdelhi.in I have corrected all the errors. When will you recrawl it ? This is absolutely not done ! The last crawl was done on 3rd May !
Technical SEO | | VarunBansal0 -
How to use overlays without getting a Google penalty
One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period. Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal. Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay. What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe? We are considering the following approaches: First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards. No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty? Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking? I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0