Dev Subdomain Pages Indexed - How to Remove
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
ok so using root domain?
-
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.
-
When you say "request removal" are you saying that I need to manually add all 100 URLs into the removal tool?
-
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).
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
-
Page must be internally linked to get indexed?
If a there is page like website.com/page; I think this page will be indexed by Google even we don't link it internally from anywhere. Is this true? Will it makes any difference in-terms of "indexability" if we list this page on sitemap? I know page's visibility will increase when link from multiple internal pages. I wonder will there be any noticeable difference while this page is listed in sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
301 migration - Indexed Pages rising on old site
Hello, We did a 301 redirect from site a to site b back in March. I would check on a daily basis on the index count using query "site:sitename" The past couple of days, the old domain (that was 301 redirected) indexed pages has been rising which is really concerning. We did a 301 redirect back in march 2016, and the indexed count went from 400k pages down to 78k. However, the past 3 days it went from 78k to 89,500. And I'm worried that the number is going to continue to rise. My question - What would you do to investigate / how to investigate this issue? Would it be screaming frog and look at redirects? Or is this a unique scenario that I'd have to do other steps/procedures?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Would it work to place H1 (or important page keywords) at the top of your page in HTML and move lower on page with CSS?
I understand that the H1 tag is no longer heavily correlated with stronger ranking signals but it is more important that Keywords or keyphrases are at the top of a page. My question is, if I just put my important keyword (or H1) toward the top of my page in the HTML and move it towards the middle/lower portion with css position elements, will this still be viewed by Googlebot as important keywords toward the top of my page? QCaxMHL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
How to remove my site's pages in search results?
I have tested hundreds of pages to see if Google will properly crawl, index and cached them. Now, I want these pages to be removed in Google search except for homepage. What should be the rule in robots.txt? I use this rule, but I am not sure if Google will remove the hundreds of pages (for my testing). User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow2013
Disallow: /
Allow: /$0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0 -
Static index page or not?
Are there any advantages of dis-advantages to running a static homepage as opposed to a blog style homepage. I have be running a static page on my site with the latest posts displayed as links after the homepage content. I would like to remove the static page and move to a more visually appealing homepage that includes graphics for each post and the posts droppping down the page like normal blogs do. How will this effect my site if I move from a static page to a more dynamic blog style page layout? Could I still hold the spot I currently rank for with the optimized index content if I turn to a more traditional blog format? cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoCoGuru0 -
Scrolling Text Old School SEO and hidden index page
We have taken over a site and now find our self looking at the homepage of the site which has hidden scrolling text. A old school way of adding text without leaving loads of paragraphs. I have also removed all links to the index.htm page but somewhere visitors are still coming to this page in there droves. I am considering using a canonical url code but I would rather nip it in the bud. Would love some feedback from some other experts here is the site - http://www.radiatorcentre.com You never stop learning in seo and maybe we can all learn from this example. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0