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.
Dev Subdomain Pages Indexed - How to Remove
-
I own a website (domain.com) and used the subdomain "dev.domain.com" while adding a new section to the site (as a development link). I forgot to block the dev.domain.com in my robots file, and google indexed all of the dev pages (around 100 of them).
I blocked the site (dev.domain.com) in robots, and then proceeded to just delete the entire subdomain altogether.
It's been about a week now and I still see the subdomain pages indexed on Google.
How do I get these pages removed from Google? Are they causing duplicate content/title issues, or does Google know that it's a development subdomain and it's just taking time for them to recognize that I deleted it already?
-
Go to WMT for whatever dev site you want to remove from the index. Use the URL removal tool, but in the box just enter /, nothing else. This will remove the entire site.
-
The root of the dev subdomain. There's a blog post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/url-removal-explained-part-i-urls.html, and you'll want to look at the section for removing an entire site. The interface has likely changed since this post, but the concept is the same.
-
ok so using root domain?
-
Nope! You can request removal of the entire site (meaning dev subdomain). For future reference, you could also request removal of a certain directory on a site, too.
-
When you say "request removal" are you saying that I need to manually add all 100 URLs into the removal tool?
-
You'll want to keep the robots.txt on the dev subdomain, then verify the subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools. Once you do this, you can request removal of the dev subdomain from Google's index (same goes for Bing).
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
-
What to do if lots of backend pages have been indexed by Google erroneously?
Hi Guys Our developer forgot to add a no index no follow tag on the pages he created in the back-end. So we have now ended up with lots of back end pages being indexed in google. So my question is, since many of those are now indexed in Google, so is it enough to just place a no index no follow on those or should we do a 301 redirect on all those to the most appropriate page? If a no index no follow is enough, that would create lots of 404 errors so could those affect the site negatively? Cheers Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martin19700 -
Redirecting homepage to internal page (2nd Tier page)
We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect. Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page. Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
301 migration - Indexed Pages rising on old site
Hello, We did a 301 redirect from site a to site b back in March. I would check on a daily basis on the index count using query "site:sitename" The past couple of days, the old domain (that was 301 redirected) indexed pages has been rising which is really concerning. We did a 301 redirect back in march 2016, and the indexed count went from 400k pages down to 78k. However, the past 3 days it went from 78k to 89,500. And I'm worried that the number is going to continue to rise. My question - What would you do to investigate / how to investigate this issue? Would it be screaming frog and look at redirects? Or is this a unique scenario that I'd have to do other steps/procedures?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
How long to re-index a page after being blocked
Morning all! I am doing some research at the moment and am trying to find out, just roughly, how long you have ever had to wait to have a page re-indexed by Google. For this purpose, say you had blocked a page via meta noindex or disallowed access by robots.txt, and then opened it back up. No right or wrong answers, just after a few numbers 🙂 Cheers, -Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?
Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL. They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https). However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google. We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages? We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen. We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages. However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.0 -
Why Is Google Indexing These Product Pages On Shopify?
How can we communicate to Google the exact product pages we'd like indexed on our site? We're an apparel company that uses Shopify as our ecommerce platform. Website is sportiqe.com. Currently, Google is indexing all types of different pages on our site. **Example of a product page we want indexed: ** Product Page: sportiqe.com/products/PRODUCT-TITLE (Like This) **Examples of product pages being indexed: ** sportiqe.myshopify.com/products/PRODUCT-TITLE sportiqe.com/collections/COLLECTION-NAME/products/PRODUCT-TITLE See attached for an example of how two different "Boston Celtics Grateful Dead" shirts are being indexed. Any suggestions? We've used both Shopify and Google Webmaster tools to set our preferred domain (sportiqe.com). We've also added this snippet of code to our site three months ago thinking that would do the trick... {% if template == 'product' %}{% if collection %} {% endif %}{% endif %} sKwNZOl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | farmiloe0 -
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google?
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google? I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast, and selected the needed option to get these pages no-index in order to avoid the duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelNewman1 -
Removing Duplicate Page Content
Since joining SEOMOZ four weeks ago I've been busy tweaking our site, a magento eCommerce store, and have successfully removed a significant portion of the errors. Now I need to remove/hide duplicate pages from the search engines and I'm wondering what is the best way to attack this? Can I solve this in one central location, or do I need to do something in the Google & Bing webmaster tools? Here is a list of duplicate content http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=list&order=name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire
http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=list&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=grid http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=list Thanks in advance, Steve0