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
-
Removing a site from Google index with no index met tags
Hi there! I wanted to remove a duplicated site from the google index. I've read that you can do this by removing the URL from Google Search console and, although I can't find it in Google Search console, Google keeps on showing the site on SERPs. So I wanted to add a "no index" meta tag to the code of the site however I've only found out how to do this for individual pages, can you do the same for a entire site? How can I do it? Thank you for your help in advance! L
Technical SEO | | Chris_Wright1 -
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS - How long does it take Google to re-index the site?
hello Moz We know that this year, Moz changed its domain to moz.com from www.seomoz.org
Technical SEO | | joony
however, when you type "site:seomoz.org" you still can find old urls indexed on Google (on page 7 and above) We also changed our site from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
And Google is indexing both sites even though we did proper 301 redirection via htaccess. How long would it take Google to refresh the index? We just don't worry about it? Say we redirected our entire site. What is going to happen to those websites that copied and pasted our content? We have already DMCAed their webpages, but making our site https would mean that their website is now more original than our site? Thus, Google assumes that we have copied their site? (Google is very slow on responding to our DMCA complaint) Thank you in advance for your reply.0 -
Why do some URLs for a specific client have "/index.shtml"?
Reviewing our client's URLs for a 301 redirect strategy, we have noticed that many URLs have "/index.shtml." The part we don'd understand is these URLs aren't the homepage and they have multiple folders followed by "/index.shtml" Does anyone happen to know why this may be occurring? Is there any SEO value in keeping the "/index.shtml" in the URL?
Technical SEO | | FranFerrara0 -
How does Google Crawl Multi-Regional Sites?
I've been reading up on this on Webmaster Tools but just wanted to see if anyone could explain it a bit better. I have a website which is going live soon which is going to be set up to redirect to a localised URL based on the IP address i.e. NZ IP ranges will go to .co.nz, Aus IP addresses would go to .com.au and then USA or other non-specified IP addresses will go to the .com address. There is a single CMS installation for the website. Does this impact the way in which Google is able to search the site? Will all domains be crawled or just one? Any help would be great - thanks!
Technical SEO | | lemonz0 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0 -
Do search engines still index/crawl private content?
If you have a membership site, which requires a payment to access specific content/images/videos, do search engines still use that content as a ranking/domain authority factor? Is it worth optimizing these "private" pages for SEO?
Technical SEO | | christinarule1