Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Blocking Subdomain from Google Crawl and Index
-
Hey everybody, how is it going?
I have a simple question, that i need answered.
I have a main domain, lets call it domain.com. Recently our company will launch a series of promotions for which we will use cname subdomains, i.e try.domain.com, or buy.domain.com. They will serve a commercial objective, nothing more.
What is the best way to block such domains from being indexed in Google, also from counting as a subdomain from the domain.com. Robots.txt, No-follow, etc?
Hope to hear from you,
Best Regards,
-
Hello George, Thank you for fast answer! I read that article and there is some issue with that. if you can see at it, i'd really appreciate it. So the problem is that if i do it directly from Tumblr, it will also block it from Tumblr users. Here is the note right below that option "Allow this blog to appear in search results":
"This applies to searches on Tumblr as well as external search engines, like Google or Yahoo."Also, if i do it from GWT, i'm very concerned to remove URLs with my subdomain because i afraid it will remove all my domain. For example, my domain is abc.com and the Tumblr blog is setup on tumblr.abc.com. So i afraid if i remove tumblr.abc.com from index, it will also remove my abc.com. Please let me know what you think.
Thank you!
-
Hi Marina,
If I understand your question correctly, you just don't want your Tumblr blog to be indexed by Google. In which case these steps will help: http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/keep-tumblr-off-google-3061.html
Regards,
George
-
Hi guys, I read your conversation. I have similar issue but my situation is slightly different. I'll really appreciate if you can help with this. So i have also a subdomain that i don't want to be indexed by Google. However, that subdomain is not in my control. I mean, i created subdomain on my hosting but it is pointing to my Tumblr blog. So i don't have access to its robot txt. So can anybody advise what can i do in this situation to noindex that subdomain?
Thanks
-
Personally I wouldn't rely just on robots.txt, as one accidental, public link to any of the pages (easier than you may think!) will result in Google indexing that subdomain page (it just won't be followed). This means that the page can get "stuck" in Google's index and to resolve it you would need to remove it using WMT (instructions here). If there were a lot of pages accidentally indexed, you would need to remove the robots.txt restriction so Google can crawl it, and put a noindex/nofollow tags on the page so Google drops it from its index.
To cut a long story short, I would do both Steps 1 and 2 outlined by Federico if you want to sleep easy at night :).
George
-
It would also be smart to add the subdomains in Webmaster Tools in case one does get indexed and you need to remove it.
-
Robots.txt is easiest and quickest way. As a back up you can use the Noindex meta tag on the pages in the subdomain
-
2 ways to do it with different effects:
-
Robots.txt in each subdomain. This will entirely block any search engine to even access those pages, so they won't know what they have inside.
User-Agent:*
Disallow: /
-
noindex tags in those pages. This method allows crawlers to read the page and maybe index (if you set a "follow") the pages to which you link to.or "nofollow" if you don't want the linked pages to be indexed either.
Hope that helps!
-
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
-
Solved Recommended title length for Google search results
I read the recommended title length is 50-60 characters depending on alphabets, etc,.
On-Page Optimization | | Mike555
Anyways, my question is, is there any harm of having longer title?
If all my important keywords are within the 50-60 characters that will show up on search results, I can still make the title longer, it's just that those keywords outside won't have any effect on search results?0 -
How to fix duplicate content for homepage and index.html
Hello, I know this probably gets asked quite a lot but I haven't found a recent post about this in 2018 on Moz Q&A, so I thought I would check in and see what the best route/solution for this issue might be. I'm always really worried about making any (potentially bad/wrong) changes to the site, as it's my livelihood, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Moz, SEMRush and several other SEO tools are all reporting that I have duplicate content for my homepage and index.html (same identical page). According to Moz, my homepage (without index.html) has PA 29 and index.html has PA 15. They are both showing Status 200. I read that you can either do a 301 redirect or add rel=canonical I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page and don't have any rel=canonical added to the site/page. What is the best and safest way to get rid of duplicate content and merge the my non index and index.html homepages together these days? I read that both 301 and canonical pass on link juice but I don't know what the best route for me is given what I said above. Thank you for reading, any input is greatly appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | dreservices0 -
No-index all the posts of a category
Hi everyone! I would like no-indexing all the posts of a specific category of my wordpress site. The problem is that the structure of my URL is composed without /category/: www.site-name.ext/date/post-name/
On-Page Optimization | | salvyy
so without /category-name/ Is possibile to disallow the indexing of all the posts of the category via robots.txt? Using Yoast Plugin I can put the no-index for each post, but I would like to put the no-index (or disallow/) a time for all the post of the category. Thanks in advance for your help and sorry for my english. Mike0 -
How does Google treat Dynamic Titles?
Let's say my website can be accessed in only 3 states Colorado, Arizona and Ohio. I want to display different information to each visitor based on where they are located. For this I would also like the title to change based on their location. Not quite sure how Google we treat the title and rank the site.... Any resources you can provide would be helpful. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
Is it convinient to use No-Index, Follow to my Paginated Pages?
I have a website http://www.naukrigulf.com and it has a lot of Paginated pages on its SERP and most of paginated pages are getting indexed in Google SERP. Is it beneficial to use No-Index, Follow to keep the link equity to main (first page), although we have already used rel=next and rel=prev. If Answer is "yes" is their any harm by using no-index, follow with rel=next, rel=prev.
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
How do i block an entire category/directory with robots.txt?
Anyone has any idea how to block an entire product category, including all the products in that category using the robots.txt file? I'm using woocommerce in wordpress and i'd like to prevent bots from crawling every single one of products urls for now. The confusing part right now is that i have several different url structures linking to every single one of my products for example www.mystore.com/all-products, www.mystore.com/product-category, etc etc. I'm not really sure how i'd type it into the robots.txt file, or where to place the file. any help would be appreciated thanks
On-Page Optimization | | bricerhodes0 -
Is it good to have a subdomain with keyword?
Hi, I want to ask do you thing that it is good and necessary to have a subdomain with a keyword in it when the domain doesn't include it? f.e. you have a website named domain.com but there is no keyword in it. And if you add subdomain keyword.domain.com will this bring any benefit?
On-Page Optimization | | vladokan0 -
How to properly remove pages and a category from Google's index
I want to remove this category http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ and all the pages in that category (e.g. http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/7386.html ) from Google's index. I used the following string in the "Reomval URS" section in Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/* is that correct or I better use http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ ? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | VinceWicks0