If the site were still up, you could verify it in Google Webmaster Tools, put up a robots.txt for that subdomain that excludes crawlers from crawling anything, then go into GWT and request the entire subdomain be removed.

Thanks! I also agree with what Neil Patel said in that post that sometimes, long copy can interfere with conversions. It's a big "it depends". Sometimes all you need is a brief answer to an FAQ that will take you 100 words, and other times you need 2000 words to properly cover a subject.

Unless it happened to show up in your feed (in which case you can see a note that it was sponsored), to my knowledge, there's no way of knowing it was paid. I asked Marty from Aim Clear and a couple of other people about this last spring, and they weren't aware of a way either. If one post has 3000 FB likes, and all the other posts by the page have about 10 likes, you can guess that they did something, however.

It looks like it's related to a toolbar where people are paid to click on ads. Skylancers.net and skylancers.com appear to be connected, based on the whois info, and on this FB post http://www.facebook.com/pages/Skylancers/200579273364198. Check out the dot com site for some more info.

On the root of the development subdomain, use the following robots.txt content to block all robots.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Next, verify the subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools as its own site, and request that that site be removed from the index.

For added protection:

• Make the robots.txt on the live site read only, so when you copy the dev site over you don't accidentally copy over the robots.txt saying to exclude everything
• Set up a code monitor on the robots.txt for both the dev site and the live site that checks the content of those files and alerts you if there are changes. I use https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php.