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 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 -
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 -
How to avoid instead suggestion from Google search results ?
Hi, When I search for "Zotey" in google, the following message is being displayed. Showing results for zotye
Technical SEO | | segistics
Search instead for zotey Anyone let me know how to get rid of this conflict asap? Regards, Sivakumar.0 -
Removing a large number of unnecessary pages from a site
Hi all, I got a big problem with my website. I have a lot of page, duplicate page made from various combinations of selects, and for all this duplicate content we've be hit by a panda update 2 years ago. I don't want to bring new content an all of these pages, about 3.000.000, because most of them are unnecessary. Google indexed all of them (3.000.000), and I want to redirect the pages that I don't need anymore to the most important ones. My question, is there any problem in how google will see this change, because after this it will remain only 5000-6000 relevant pages?
Technical SEO | | Silviu0 -
Removing images from site and Image Sitemap SEO advice
Hello again, I have received an update request where they want me to remove images from this site (as of now its a bunch of thumbnails) current page design: http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/car-wraps/ and turn it into a new design which utilized a slider (such as this): http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/ They don't want the thumbnails on the page anymore. My question is since my site has a image sitemap that has been indexed will removing all the images hurt my SEO greatly? What would the recommended steps to take to reduce any SEO damage be, if so? Thank you again for your help, always great and very helpful feedback! 🙂 cheers!
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
Why are Google search results different if you are log'd into Google or not?
I get different results when I'm log'd into my Google account associated with my website than if I'm not. The same country is occurring. So how can I rely on the google results I'm seeing? For instance my site is page 1 with the improvements I made based on SEOMOZ if I'm log'd in. Yet I'm not on the first 25 pages if I'm not logged in.
Technical SEO | | Romana0 -
Google.ca is showing our US site instead of our Canada Site
When our Canadian users who search on google.ca for our brand (e.g. Travelocity, Travelocity hotels, etc.), the first few results our from our US site (travelocity.com) rather than our Canadian site (travelocity.ca). In Google Webmaster Tools, we've adjusted the geotargeting settings to focus on the appropriate locale, but the wrong country TLD is still coming up at the top via google.ca. What's the best way to ensure our Canadian site comes up instead of the US site on google.ca? Thanks, Tory Smith
Technical SEO | | travelocitysearch
Travelocity0