Time to deindexing: WMT Request vs. Server not found
-
Google indexed some subdomains (13!) that were never supposed to exist, but apparently returned a 200 code when Google somehow crawled them. I can get these subdomains to return a "server not found" error by turning off wildcard subdomains at my DNS. I've been told that these subdomains will be deindexed just from this server not found error.
I was going to use Webmaster Tools and verify each domain, but I'm on an economy goDaddy server and apparently subdomains just get forwarded to a directory, so subdomain.domain.com gets redirected to domain.com/subdomain. I'm not even sure with this being the case, if I can get WMT to recognize and remove these subdomains like that.
Should I fret about this, or will the "server not found" message get Google to remove these soon enough?
-
Unfortunately, Google may continue to keep those pages in its index for months, even if they return a 404. The 2 best options in these cases is usually:
- Claim the profile in GWT - which would probably be possible but requires a lot of work with Godaddy configuring the subdomains just so you could claim the profile and de-index.
- I haven't tried it, but Google introduced a URL removal tools for URLs you don't controll. Might be a good use case here. Here's some info: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/12/improving-url-removals-on-third-party.html
-
Ive seen this a couple times
It does go away eventually.
-
No they were not duplicates. They all just showed a soft 404 provided by goDaddy. We had wildcards turned on, but even so I don't understand how Google found these. They were just not used for anything ever i.e. vww.example.com
People have pointed to them as something wonky, so I'm trying to get rid of them in case they are hurting our site's overall performance in the SERP.
-
This will eventually stop the pages being indexed yes. It may take several days in some cases but they will go.
Were these subdomains duplicates of your main domain? If so you could try 301 redirecting them as this could speed the process up.
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
-
When you change your domain, How much time do I have to wait for google to return the traffic used to have?
Hello. 20 days ago, I changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com doing redirect 301 to all urls, and I started to loose rankings since that moment. I was wondering if changing it back could be the solutions, but some experts recommend me not to do that, because it could be worse. Right now I receave almost 50% of traffic I used to receave before, and I have done a lot of linkbuilding strategies to recover but nothing have worked until now. Even though I notified google of this change and I send again my new sitemap, I don't see that have improve my situation in any aspects, and I still see in webmastertools search stats from my last website (the website who used to be uclasificados.com before the change). What should I do to recover faster?
Technical SEO | | capmartin850 -
Https - should I do change of address on WMT
We have added a SSL cert to our site - Should I submit change of address on WMT and submit a new sitemap from the http?
Technical SEO | | webguru20140 -
How do I find which pages are being deindexed on a large site?
Is there an easy way or any way to get a list of all deindexed pages? Thanks for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
Unnatural Link Warning Removed - WMT's
Hi, just a quick one. We had an unnatural link warning for one of our test sites, the message appeared on the WMT's dashboard. The message is no longer there, has it simply expired or could this mean that Google no longer sees an unatural backlink profile? Hoping it's the latter but doubtful as we haven't tried to remove any links.. as I say it's just a test site. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Webpresence0 -
Server crashed - What should I do regarding Google SERP´s?
We have several travel websites in Uruguay since 2003. These sites have a very high PR and Trust. The server where all our sites are hosted has crashed and we have been for 2 days now trying to fix all this mess. We hope this problem will be fixed today. Please I really need to know what should I do regarding Google. I mean one of our sites has been ranking in top 1 positions for more than 150 keywords. Will we loose all that? What can we do about it? It´s the first time this has happened to our sites.
Technical SEO | | ceci27100 -
Hacked Server IP Range Penality?
I use a justhost.com reseller account to host about 15-20 of my own websites. None of the sites are related, nor do I interlink or do anything blackhat with any of them. All of the sites have unique content. Some of it isn't great, but I didn't use a writing service on any of then, it was all written by myself. Recently I found a list of my sites (as well as about 200 others hosted by justhost) on a hacker website that listed the cpanel usernames. I alerted the host and the issue is being fixed. I am changing all of my usernames and passwords for all of the sites. Anyway, I recently took a look at some analytics and rankings and noticed that I lost a lot of my rankings on a handful of those sites recently. I know there was the big de-indexing of junk blogs recently, but I don't think that is the case. I can still find all of my sites in Google, they are just out of the first 50 results, when a majority of them were ranked from 5-20 in the SERPs. Here are three of the sites and their phrases: http://nintendoconsoles.com/ "nintendo consoles" - This domain I bought from someone so there could be some sort of sandbox period for it. http://webhostingfordrupal.com/ "web hosting for drupal" - This was a new register. http://seotirical.com "seotirical" - we don't show up, but all of the tweets and links to us do. - This was a new register. I realize these sites aren't perfect, and might not have been ready for the first page. The Nintendo site is about 3 months old, but the Drupal site has been around for 8+ months. I might try adding a fresh piece of content tonight to see if that helps, but I thought it was curious that it happened across the board with about 5-6 sites on my one reseller account. I don't even know if the top portion of this post has anything to do with the problems, but I thought I'd see if anyone has insight. Cheers,
Technical SEO | | vforvinnie
Vinnie0 -
On a dedicated server with multiple IP addresses, how can one address group be slow/time out and all other IP addresses OK?
We utilize a dedicated server to host roughly 60 sites on. The server is with a company that utilizes a lady who drives race cars.... About 4 months ago we realized we had a group of sites down thanks to monitoring alerts and checked it out. All were on the same IP address and the sites on the other IP address were still up and functioning well. When we contacted the support at first we were stonewalled, but eventually they said there was a problem and it was resolved within about 2 hours. Up until recently we had no problems. As a part of our ongoing SEO we check page load speed for our clients. A few days ago a client who has their site hosted by the same company was running very slow (about 8 seconds to load without cache). We ran every check we could and could not find a reason on our end. The client called the host and were told they needed to be on some other type of server (with the host) at a fee increase of roughly $10 per month. Yesterday, we noticed one group of sites on our server was down and, again, it was one IP address with about 8 sites on it. On chat with support, they kept saying it was our ISP. (We speed tested on multiple computers and were 22MB down and 9MB up +/-2MB). We ran a trace on the IP address and it went through without a problem on three occassions over about ten minutes. After about 30 minutes the sites were back up. Here's the twist: we had a couple of people in the building who were on other ISP's try and the sites came up and loaded on their machines. Does anyone have any idea as to what the issue is?
Technical SEO | | RobertFisher0 -
.COM vs .CA rankings - .CA ranks on Google.com
Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains. Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages). The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so. Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com. We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country. With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US? Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?
Technical SEO | | HarborOneBank0