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.
Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain
-
We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record. We use Google Mail internally. The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications.
Example of one of the links:
Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.
-
You appear to have the MX sub-domain also set up as an A record.
If you have a mac / linux you can run the command: host aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com
You get the result aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com has address 72.10.48.198
Where you should get the result "not found".
I think you want to delete the A record (though check the documentation of your email provider first). You should only need them set up as MX records and shouldn't need the A record.
You've done the right thing by setting up the redirect - which should mean that the pages drop out of the index and those links disappear. (Note that there is also an https error on the aspmx3 sub-domain - but given that you don't actually want it, I don't suppose that matters that much).
Hope that helps.
-
I did not explain the problem thoroughly. The problem is, the link does not actually exist anywhere. To make a very long story short. There was an issue with server configuration for a period of a couple months. During that time, an unknown number of non-existent subdomains got indexed. Basically, if anyone had a typo in the subdomain when accessing our site, it would get cached and if Google crawled our site before we cleared the cache, the typo subdomain would get indexed. Over a period of a couple months, many bad subdomains were accidentally created and indexed by Google. We do not have any way of finding a comprehensive list of all of them. This problem has been resolved so we are not getting new bad subdomains created and indexed, but the damage has been done.
The way our site is setup currently, any attempt to reach our site with any subdomain other than "www" gets redirected to "www.sullivan..." Also, any nonsecure protocol gets resolved to https://
The actual problem, simply put is this: Google has an index which includes some number of unknown, non existent subdomains. We need to get rid of them and cannot figure out how.
Example: Copy and paste the following into google and search it:
site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com
Google will return two results. If you click on either, it resolves to the "https://www. version of the page.
I know it is confusing, but does that make sense? I have searched everywhere, but the reason this happened was because of a perfect storm of server configuration issues and I cannot find anyone else who has had the same problem.
If it were one or two bad subdomains, we would just put them into search console and then get "remove URL" for the entire subdomain. But it is not 1 or 2. It is at least 10 that I know of and could be hundreds for all I know.
Does anyone have any ideas? Any and all would be welcome.
Thank you.
-
You should find the locations of those links and correct them to point to the proper URL. I find that Screaming Frog's crawl is the easiest for this, you can find every link and see where they are located.
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
-
How to check if an individual page is indexed by Google?
So my understanding is that you can use site: [page url without http] to check if a page is indexed by Google, is this 100% reliable though? Just recently Ive worked on a few pages that have not shown up when Ive checked them using site: but they do show up when using info: and also show their cached versions, also the rest of the site and pages above it (the url I was checking was quite deep) are indexed just fine. What does this mean? thank you p.s I do not have WMT or GA access for these sites
Technical SEO | | linklander0 -
Why google indexed pages are decreasing?
Hi, my website had around 400 pages indexed but from February, i noticed a huge decrease in indexed numbers and it is continually decreasing. can anyone help me to find out the reason. where i can get solution for that? will it effect my web page ranking ?
Technical SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)
Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Clicksjim1 -
Site not ranking in Google but comes up #1 in Yahoo and Bing
Hi everyone, I've been working on SEO for this site for about 2 years and for some reason the site has just tanked in google. However it shows up #1 in yahoo and bing for the same search. http://www.nfsmn.com Phrase: "commercial foundation repair mn" If anyone can shed some light on the issue I would really appreciate it. They do have a sister-site: american-waterworks.com that may be causing issues as they link a lot of content to amww but not the other way around. Thanks Eric
Technical SEO | | reynoldsdesign0 -
When is the last time Google crawled my site
How do I tell the last time Google crawled my site. I found out it is not the "Cache" which I had thought it was.
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
Does Google index XML files?
Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How do I redirect index.html to the root / ?
The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0