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.
Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain
-
We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record. We use Google Mail internally. The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications.
Example of one of the links:
Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.
-
You appear to have the MX sub-domain also set up as an A record.
If you have a mac / linux you can run the command: host aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com
You get the result aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com has address 72.10.48.198
Where you should get the result "not found".
I think you want to delete the A record (though check the documentation of your email provider first). You should only need them set up as MX records and shouldn't need the A record.
You've done the right thing by setting up the redirect - which should mean that the pages drop out of the index and those links disappear. (Note that there is also an https error on the aspmx3 sub-domain - but given that you don't actually want it, I don't suppose that matters that much).
Hope that helps.
-
I did not explain the problem thoroughly. The problem is, the link does not actually exist anywhere. To make a very long story short. There was an issue with server configuration for a period of a couple months. During that time, an unknown number of non-existent subdomains got indexed. Basically, if anyone had a typo in the subdomain when accessing our site, it would get cached and if Google crawled our site before we cleared the cache, the typo subdomain would get indexed. Over a period of a couple months, many bad subdomains were accidentally created and indexed by Google. We do not have any way of finding a comprehensive list of all of them. This problem has been resolved so we are not getting new bad subdomains created and indexed, but the damage has been done.
The way our site is setup currently, any attempt to reach our site with any subdomain other than "www" gets redirected to "www.sullivan..." Also, any nonsecure protocol gets resolved to https://
The actual problem, simply put is this: Google has an index which includes some number of unknown, non existent subdomains. We need to get rid of them and cannot figure out how.
Example: Copy and paste the following into google and search it:
site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com
Google will return two results. If you click on either, it resolves to the "https://www. version of the page.
I know it is confusing, but does that make sense? I have searched everywhere, but the reason this happened was because of a perfect storm of server configuration issues and I cannot find anyone else who has had the same problem.
If it were one or two bad subdomains, we would just put them into search console and then get "remove URL" for the entire subdomain. But it is not 1 or 2. It is at least 10 that I know of and could be hundreds for all I know.
Does anyone have any ideas? Any and all would be welcome.
Thank you.
-
You should find the locations of those links and correct them to point to the proper URL. I find that Screaming Frog's crawl is the easiest for this, you can find every link and see where they are located.
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
-
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
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.
Technical SEO | | QuantumWeb620 -
Fake Links indexing in google
Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)
Technical SEO | | mshowells0 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below,
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
Can you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
0 -
How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages
We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th. It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
How to stop my webmail pages not to be indexed on Google ??
when i did a search in google for Site:mywebsite.com , for a list of pages indexed. Surprisingly the following come up " Webmail - Login " Although this is associated with the domain , this is a completely different server , this the rackspace email server browser interface I am sure that there is nothing on the website that links or points to this.
Technical SEO | | UIPL
So why is Google indexing it ? & how do I get it out of there. I tried in webmaster tool but I could not , as it seems like a sub-domain. Any ideas ? Thanks Naresh Sadasivan0 -
How do I redirect index.html to the root / ?
The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0 -
What are the pros and cons of moving one site onto a subdomain of another site?
Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?
Technical SEO | | GriffinHansen0
