Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain

    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

    Technical SEO
    3
    4
    894
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • SS.Digital
      SS.Digital last edited by

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • willcritchlow
        willcritchlow last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • SS.Digital
          SS.Digital @Tenlo last edited by

          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.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Tenlo
            Tenlo last edited by

            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.

            SS.Digital 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • Chophel

              My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.

              Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages.  I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
              {YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
              {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
              {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
              {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
              {YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
              {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
              {YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
              {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
              {HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
              {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php

              Technical SEO | | Chophel
              0
            • TheHecksler

              Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?

              Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
              de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
              en.domain.com
              /de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code  -  we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
              We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂

              Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
              0
            • vikrantrathore

              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 | | vikrantrathore
              0
            • seogirl22

              Vanity URLs are being indexed in Google

              We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like:  www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to?  If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,

              Technical SEO | | seogirl22
              1
            • Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website

              Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.

              This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum. We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index." No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file. Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping. We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter. It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas? I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.

              Technical SEO | | Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website
              0
            • JohnHuynh

              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 | | JohnHuynh
              0
            • FastLearner

              Does google use the wayback machine to determine the age of a site?

              I have a site that I had removed from the wayback machine because I didn't want old versions to show. However I noticed that in many seo tools the site now always shows a domain age of zero instead of 6 years ago when I registered it. My question is what do the actual search engines use to determine age when they factor it into the ranking algorithm? By having it removed from the wayback machine, does that make the search engines think the site is brand new? Thanks

              Technical SEO | | FastLearner
              0
            • anand2010

              How to remove a sub domain from Google Index!

              Hello, I have a website having many subdomains having same copy of content i think its harming my SEO for that site since abc and xyz sub domains do have same contents. Thus i require to know i have already deleted required subdomain DNS RECORDS now how to have those pages removed from Google index as  well ? The DNS Records no more exists for those subdomains already.

              Technical SEO | | anand2010
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.