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Dev Subdomain Pages Indexed - How to Remove
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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?
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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.
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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.
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ok so using root domain?
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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.
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When you say "request removal" are you saying that I need to manually add all 100 URLs into the removal tool?
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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).
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