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
-
Google rankings
I have encountered a serious problem with google rankings and the sequence of events goes like this for a high volume phrase. I make changes to the page which gets a score of 98 in Moz and equally good scores in other tools. I resubmit the page to Google for searching via crawl in google webmasters. After about 1/2 to 1 day, the page will be ranked between 30 and 50. Within another 1/2 to 1 day, the ranking goes completely away. This page has much higher scores than pages that are ranked. Other phrases continue to rank OK.
On-Page Optimization | | tiedyedshop0 -
Eliminate render-blocking CSS in above the fold content with shopify
Hello, It seems that my shopify website needs to eliminate render-blocking CSS in above the fold content to get better mobile speed and I don't see or find anything about how this could be done. I have succeeded with a wordpress site but the way things are restricted with shopify, I have not been able to do the same. The other thing would be to leverage browser caching which I have no clue how it can be done with shopify either. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Mabo320 -
Should I block google indexing "search.php"
My question is I have a search page on our website , you can search by date, number of people staying and so on, I am just wondering should block this in the robots.txt ? Because we have pretty URL'S already for searching by county and searching by towns. I cannot see any benefit of having e.g "search/search.php?sp_dateFrom=16%2F12%2F2015&sp_dateTo=23%2F12%2F2015&sec_drop%5B%5D=727&spesh_town_id=764&q=&occupants=5&bedrooms=3&submit=SEARCH#search" indexed. Would I be correct in doing this ?
On-Page Optimization | | McCaldin0 -
How Does Google Webmaster Tools Come Up with Content Keywords?
When I look at Google Webmaster Tools, in the Content Keywords report there are a couple of ones that are suspect - "prescription", "medications", and "viagra" which are completely unrelated to the content of the site. When I click on the content keyword, and search the source code for those pages, I don't see those words in the source code. Can someone please help me figure out why Google thinks that these keywords are associated with these pages, and how to correct it?
On-Page Optimization | | bernardablola0 -
Blocking Google seeing outbound links?
Apart from rewriting the outbound url to look like a folder 'abc.co.uk/out/link1' and blocking the folder 'out' in the robots.txt file, along with also nofollowing the links as well, is there anything else you can do?
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper0 -
Right way to block google robots from ppc landing pages
What is the right way to completely block seo robots from my adword landing pages? Robots.txt does not work really good for that, as far I know. Adding metatags noindex nofollow on the other side will block adwords robot as well. right? Thank you very much, Serge
On-Page Optimization | | Kotkov0 -
What URL Should I use in Google Place Page?
Alright, I have a client that has 1 website and 14 locations. We want to create place pages for each of their locations but my question is which URL should I put in the place page and why? I can put in the root domain into each place page, or should I put in the URL that lands on the actual location on the root. example: domain.com/location1 Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | tcseopro0 -
Why isn't Google indexing me?
Recently got handed off a .org site for a quasi state agency here in Michigan. Turns out the developer had the site live for the past six months but left the noindex, nofollow tag on everything so the site was invisible to search engines. Obviously we wiped all of those things a couple weeks ago when we got started, added all of our sitemaps to bing/yahoo/google webmaster tools and we've already started getting indexed by yahoo and bing and showing up for branded terms...but NOTHING from Google. WMT says our pages are all indexed, but we aren't showing up for anything in search and we don't seem to be indexed at all. Granted, if this site was brand new and didn't have any links I could see us taking a little time to get found, but this site has very good .gov and .edu links, plus we've built some other solid links to it since we've launched and Google continues to ignore it. I haven't seen this before, but could Google still be ignoring us from the months of noindex, nofollowing? If so, any tips on how to get back in teh Google's good graces here?
On-Page Optimization | | NetvantageMarketing0