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My website careerfield.org

shows up in google for random sub-domains that I have never created like imap.careerfield.org etc. You can see a bunch of them showing up if you go to google and type "site:careerfield.org". I don't want to de-index the whole site but I am wondering what to do about these sub-domains and how they showed up in the first place. Any help would be awesome.

Joseph Stevenson
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2 Answers2

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imap.careerfield.org exists and works.

The problem has nothing to do with Google, it has to do with how your DNS is configured, you need to remove the unwanted names with your hosting company.

cahen
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imap might refer to the mail protocol, so maybe it was linked somewhere, or Google just tries common prefixes to see if they exist.

The best solution is to redirect invalid subdomain to your canonical domain. That way, Google knows it shouldn't index those subdomains but only the actual domain.

Alternatively, you could return 404 not found, or 403 forbidden when someone tries to use an invalid subdomain.

If you actually want those subdomains to exists, you can still tell Google about the canonical url of a page. This helps Google in determining that there are multiple urls to a page and which one is the 'leading' one. See Use canonical URLs on Google support.

Community
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GolezTrol
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  • That makes a lot of sense. I have the subdomains configured so they won't just show a 404 but I really ought to redirect them. I hadn't though of that and I should be able to just redirect all sub-domains to the parent url. Thank you! – Joseph Stevenson Aug 25 '15 at 20:32