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
-
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url). Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
Technical SEO | | woshea0 -
Google image search filter tabs and how to rank on them
I have noticed Google image search has included suggestion tabs (e.g,. design, nature... when searching background) on the top of the image search.
Technical SEO | | Mike555
Are there specific meta tags I can add into my images so that my images will show up on each tab?
Do those filters just show content based on image keywords or something else? IRme7gQ0 -
Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain
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.
Technical SEO | | SS.Digital0 -
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_Website0 -
How to remove my cdn sub domins on Google search result?
A few months ago I moved all my Wordpress images into a sub domain. After I purchased CDN service, I again moved that images to my root domain. I added User-agent: * Disallow: / to my CDN domain. But now, when I perform site search on the Google, I found that my CDN sub domains are indexed by the Google. I think this will make duplicate content issue. I already hit by the Panguin. How do I remove these search results on Google? Should I add my cdn domain to webmaster tools to request URL removal request? Problem is, If I use cdn.mydomain.com it shows my www.mydomain.com. My blog:- http://goo.gl/58Utt site search result:- http://goo.gl/ElNwc
Technical SEO | | Godad1 -
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 -
Why is my site jumping around in google search ?
Hi I've been trying to get my page up in google results and I was wondering why the constant fluctuation. For example, on one day the pages is nr. 26, the next day it's nr. 65 then jumps back on say 30 and then in a few more days it's going back to 50. What's the logic behind that ? Thanks Cezar
Technical SEO | | sparts1 -
How is a dash or "-" handled by Google search?
I am targeting the keyword AK-47 and it the variants in search (AK47, AK-47, AK 47) . How should I handle on page SEO? Right now I have AK47 and AK-47 incorporated. So my questions is really do I need to account for the space or is Google handling a dash as a space? At a quick glance of the top 10 it seems the dash is handled as a space, but I just wanted to get a conformation from people much smarter then I at seomoz. Thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | idiHost0