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.
No index on subdomains
-
Hi,
We have a subdomain that is appearing in the search results - I want to hide this as it looks really bad. If I were to add the no index tag to the sub domain would URL would this affect the whole domain or just that sub domain?
The main domain is vitally important - it is just that sub domain I need to hide.
Many thanks
-
Andy and Alan covered what you need to do. One more thing to keep in mind, check the traffic, you don't want to lose those spot in the SERPS. You might want to consider fixing up the subdomain if it gets you conversions and traffic.
-
does the root domain link to the subdomain?
if so then noindex,follow the pages in the subdomain, this will allow link juice to flow back out of the subdomain.
any links pointing to a nofollow page will waste their link juice -
Hi Nicholas,
You are fine noindexing the subdomain. However, you will need to create a new robots.txt file and place it in the subdomain root for it to work.
-Andy
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
-
Keywords are indexed on the home page
Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Ginovdw1 -
Moving E-Commerce Store to Subdomain?
Hi all, We have a customer who currently uses Square for their in-store point-of-sale system as well as for their e-commerce website. From my understanding, a Square site is a watered-down version of Weebly, and is proving to be highly restrictive from an SEO and content structuring standpoint. It's been an uphill battle to try and get traction for their site in SERPs. Would it be a bad idea to move the entire Square online store to a subdomain, and install WordPress on the root domain? This way their online store would remain as-is, but the primary pages on the site would be on WordPress which would give us a lot more control over the content. I just want to make sure this doesn't negatively impact their SEO. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | suarezventures0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Best practices for types of pages not to index
Trying to better understand best practices for when and when not use a content="noindex". Are there certain types of pages that we shouldn't want Google to index? Contact form pages, privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive pages (using wordpress). Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | RichHamilton_qcs0 -
Robots.txt on subdomains
Hi guys! I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?
Technical SEO | | Whittie0 -
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 -
How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages
We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th. It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
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