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.
Removing site subdomains from Google search
-
Hi everyone,
I hope you are having a good week?
My website has several subdomains that I had shut down some time back and pages on these subdomains are still appearing in the Google search result pages.
I want all the URLs from these subdomains to stop appearing in the Google search result pages and I was hoping to see if anyone can help me with this.
The subdomains are no longer under my control as I don't have web hosting for these sites (so these subdomain sites just show a default hosting server page). Because of this, I cannot verify these in search console and submit a url/site removal request to Google.
In total, there are about 70 pages from these subdomains showing up in Google at the moment and I'm concerned in case these pages have any negative impacts on my SEO.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
-
Hi Andrew,
If you can send me the domain I'll have a look at the DNS and see if there's anything that looks unusual. Drop me a message on here, or email me on david@bringdigital.co.uk
Cheers
David
-
Hi David,
Thank you very much for sharing these options with me. I don't have Google Analytics for the subdomains so I tried the second option.
I selected 'domain name provider', went with 'other', and added a txt record to the DNS configuration for the main domain as per Google's instructions yesterday. I just checked the status a minute ago and I'm still seeing the verification failure message coming up as below:
"Your verification DNS TXT record was not found. You might need to wait a few minutes before Google sees your changes to the TXT records."
How long does it normally take to verify a property this way?
Thanks again David for your kind help.
-
Hi Andrew! How is this going? We'd love an update!
-
Hi Andrew,
Is it possible for you to have your hosting provider or domain registrar setup a redirect from the old subdomains to the current domain in use?
Best regards,
Anders -
Hi Andrew,
This can be solved, you have a couple of options:
-
Do you have Google Analytics accounts for these subdomains? If so you could register search console via GA and remove the subdomains from there
-
Even if you don't have web hosting for these subdomains, as long as you have control over the main domain you can still take control of these subdomains. Is the core domain still under your control? If so you can register for search console via the 'domain name provider' option.
Thanks,
David
-
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 -
Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions
Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | ruggero0 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
How to remove all sandbox test site link indexed by google?
When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
Site disappearing from search for a certain keyword
I was wondering if someone has encountered the same problem as me. I was doing some changes on the frontpage of one of my clients' website, especially some redirections, and my site has disappeared from Google for the main keyword on the page. So, if I look for my page on Google, instead of seeing my page first, I no longer see my page, at all. All I've done was a 301 redirection from index.html to the domain name. Now, I changed everything back to how it was before. More precisely, I've done that 2 weeks ago. But, no change in Google. I checked Bing and Yahoo, my site appears first when I search for that specific keyword. Any ideas how long will it take for Google to see that I am not doing anything wrong with redirections? Or any idea at all?
Technical SEO | | webmasterles0 -
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 -
What are the pros and cons of moving one site onto a subdomain of another site?
Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?
Technical SEO | | GriffinHansen0