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
-
Subdomain 403 error
Hi Everyone, A crawler from our SEO tool detects a 403 error from a link from our main domain to a a couple of subdomains. However, these subdomains are perfect accessibly. What could be the problem? Is this error caused by the server, the crawlbot or something else? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
Can't get my site recognised for keyword
My site prettycool.co.uk and primary we sell fascinators, the problem is I can't get the word fascinators to be listed by Google. We are on the 1st page for most colours ie. pink fascinators, blue fascinators etc. but for the term fascinators even if we fetch we are listed for a couple of hours and then disappear. I've checked for keyword stuffing but our site sell fascinators and we need to have this word in our site and other sites have a lot more references to the term and are listed on the 1st or 2nd pages. We used to be listed on page 1 for many years but the last 2 or 3 years dropped back to page 4 but now nothing. Any help or suggestions would be fantastic!
Technical SEO | | Rutts0 -
Local SEO: Spain - having trouble getting to first page
Dear, Moz community We are an online advertising website / direcotry. Lately we discovered that our website due to technical error was in English rather than Spanish and was not ranking in the local Spanish google.es at all. After changing the main language we quickly climbed to 2nd page with rankings in google.es . **My question is on top of regular SEO (Link building, content, blog) what could we do to help us rank quicker in local google.es. ** The same keyword ranks in google.com as #3 but not in Spain. Should we put in the effort to work with local directories? Google MyBusiness is not an option as we are not a bricks and mortar business.
Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud0 -
I have consolidated my subdomains into subfolders; should i remove the subdomains also?
Hi, I have consolidated my website's many sub-domains into sub-folders. We had ~20 sub-domains. The sub-domains and the root domain shared the same code-base and sub-domain specific features were controlled using Apache's SetEnv directive in the httpd.conf includes. Now they are consolidated. I have redirected all of the sub-domains to the relevant sub-folder; so http://sub1.mysite.com now 301 redirects to http://www.mysite.com/sub1.The redirects happen in the htaccess file and all sub-domains and the root are still pointing to the same code-base. However, the Moz campaign tracker still occasionally tells me that i have optimisation opportunities at http://sub1.mysite.com and in both Bing and Google webmaster tools traffic to those sub-domains is mentioned. Should i delete the subdomains? Cheers
Technical SEO | | McCaldin0 -
Why are my webpages not getting indexed?
I want to figure out why a lot of my pages for my website are not getting indexed by google. I have installed the SEO plugin by Yoast to my wordpress website. Under the titles and meta section of the plugin options I have set categories and tags to noindex. In WMT, google is saying that all my category pages and most of my tag pages are not being indexed. I want to make sure that the reason these pages are not being indexed are because of the SEO plugin. I want to prevent duplicate content so that is the reason I have set my categories and tags to noindex. Please respond if you know the absolute answer, its very important that I have my website indexed the proper way I want it to.
Technical SEO | | Dino640 -
2 sites versus a subdomain: Which is better?
I have a client that sponsors a couple of events during the year. They currently have pages within a single website for these events but are interested in creating a separate website so they can brand the events differently. I'm not sure this is the most effective way to do it for fear of losing the "google juice" already there for these pages.Here's what I'm thinking is a better strategy: 1) Host the content both on the main domain and the sub-domain2) Make sure there is a tag on each page of the sub-domain version that points to the main version.That will give them the branding they are seeking while pushing all juice across to the main domain.What are your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Britewave0 -
I am getting html validation errors on my schema, is there something I've done incorrectly?
When I tried to validate my html after added some schema, I am getting html validation errors. I have some examples below. Any ideas on what I've done incorrectly? www.mexpro.com Line 9, Column 80: there is no attribute "itemprop" `…ontent="http://www.mexpro.com/mexico/images/mexpro-logo.jpg" itemprop=**"**logo" />`_L Line 130, Column 23_: "itemscope" is not a member of a group specified for any attribute `itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">`
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
If I get a natural link for a great site and I have my keyword with anchor text in this link, how should I proceed?
If I get a natural link for a great site and I have my keyword with anchor text in this link, how should I proceed? I need to contact the site and ask to remove the link or request the removal of the anchor text and leave only the site URL? Or yet do not I need to worry about this issue?
Technical SEO | | soulmktpro0