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No they were not duplicates. They all just showed a soft 404 provided by goDaddy. We had wildcards turned on, but even so I don't understand how Google found these. They were just not used for anything ever i.e. vww.example.com

People have pointed to them as something wonky, so I'm trying to get rid of them in case they are hurting our site's overall performance in the SERP.

Google indexed some subdomains (13!) that were never supposed to exist, but apparently returned a 200 code when Google somehow crawled them. I can get these subdomains to return a "server not found" error by turning off wildcard subdomains at my DNS. I've been told that these subdomains will be deindexed just from this server not found error.

I was going to use Webmaster Tools and verify each domain, but I'm on an economy goDaddy server and apparently subdomains just get forwarded to a directory, so subdomain.domain.com gets redirected to domain.com/subdomain. I'm not even sure with this being the case, if I can get WMT to recognize and remove these subdomains like that.

Should I fret about this, or will the "server not found" message get Google to remove these soon enough?

Thanks for both of your responses!

@IrvCo_Interactive I do have a Webmaster Tools and I do not have any warnings. But I do see 70 errors under Search Appearance > Structured Data, all regarding Missing: author and/or Missing: updated. I will look into what that's about.

I am working to fix the weird subdomains coming up in Google for our site. We never used these domains and someone suggested to me that this might be a result of a wildcard A record in my DNS. This other Moz article mentioned to use .htaccess to 301 these, so that might be the fix I use: http://moz.com/blog/find-your-sites-biggest-technical-flaws-in-60-minutes

I am not quite sure what I need to do to make sure my site's internal structure is solid, I just set it up in ways that seemed intuitive from a user perspective. I'm sure there are articles out there on this subject though.

@Moosa Hemani Indeed that site http://www.hvhtek.com/associates/surfopt/surfopt.html does use a few paragraphs from our site. What tool did you use to identify that this duplication was out there? I have done almost no work on link building and neither has anyone else, so in a sense what we have now is our natural link profile. But our site has been around for a long time so we may have gathered some bad links anyway.

Hi all,

I'm trying to determine why my site (surfaceoptics.com) ranks so much lower than my competitor's sites. I do not believe the site / page content explains this differential in ranking, and I've done on-site / on-page SEO work without much or any improvement. In fact I believe my site is very similar in quality to competitor sites that rank much higher for my target keyword of: hyperspectral imaging.

This leads me to believe there is a technical problem with the site that I'm not seeing, or that the answer lies in our backlink profile. The problem is that I've compared our site with 4 of our competitors in the Open Site Explorer and I'm not seeing a strong trend when it comes to backlinks either. Some competitors have more links / better backlink profiles but then other sites have no external links to their pages and lower PA and DA and still outrank us by 30+ positions.

How should I go about determining if the problem is backlinks or some technical issue with the site?