How to stop Google from showing erroneous and stale subdomain page in sitelinks

How to stop Google from showing erroneous and stale subdomain page in sitelinks - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search-console, google-search, subdomain to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about How to stop Google from showing erroneous and stale subdomain page in sitelinks.Problem :


For our domain, example.com, we have 2 subdomains: a0.example.com and a1.example.com. These 2 are meant only for product images -- images stored here are accessed like a0.example.com/var1/var2/prod_id_img_1.jpg, and linked from products listed under www.example.com. There is no other usage of these subdomains.



Before release, we had a page at (a0|a1).example.com saying 'Coming Soon', which we missed out to remove later on (as not accessed from our main site).



Now, we find that when we search for our domain, 'example', then the 1st sitelink is 'Coming Soon' and links to a0.example.com (the other 5 sitelinks shown are valid).



Questions are:




  1. How do I properly get rid of this page so that it doesn't show up on google sitelinks (and any other searches, if any)? Should I just remove it to effect a 404 status or should I run it through 410, or do I need to do anything else -- for a proper removal (for ever)?


  2. Scanning through the nginx logs, I notice that google bot is periodically looking for sitemaps under (a0|a1).example.com. Am I missing any explicit configuration due to which google bot is looking for sitemaps here, or is this behaviour kind of standard and I need not worry?


  3. On webmaster, we have example.com and www.example.com properties. example.com is not configured but www.example.com is and is working fine. Do I need to do anything with example.com property that may help with our (s0|s1).example.com usage?




Thank you in advance for your help.


Solution :

You have a few options.




  1. Remove and allow to all requests to issue a 404 error, however, if this is an index.html within the root of each sub-domain, I would highly recommend not doing this and keeping the file for security reasons.


  2. Exclude the page in a robots.txt file within each sub-domain web space. Here is example code to exclude the index.html file within each sub-domain web root.



    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /index.html

  3. Use noindex within the HTML header. Here is example code to place within the HTML <head> tag.



    <meta name="robots" content="noindex">

  4. Redirect any request for the page to the site home page. Here is example code to do just that. You can put this in your .htaccess file within each sub-domain web root. (Assuming Apache)



    Redirect permanent /index.html http://www.example.com/


If the issue about seo, google-search-console, google-search, subdomain is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.

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