Time to deindexing: WMT Request vs. Server not found

[erin_soc]

Google indexed some subdomains (13!) that were never supposed to exist, but apparently returned a 200 code when Google somehow crawled them. I can get these subdomains to return a "server not found" error by turning off wildcard subdomains at my DNS. I've been told that these subdomains will be deindexed just from this server not found error.

I was going to use Webmaster Tools and verify each domain, but I'm on an economy goDaddy server and apparently subdomains just get forwarded to a directory, so subdomain.domain.com gets redirected to domain.com/subdomain. I'm not even sure with this being the case, if I can get WMT to recognize and remove these subdomains like that.

Should I fret about this, or will the "server not found" message get Google to remove these soon enough?

[adammason]

This will eventually stop the pages being indexed yes. It may take several days in some cases but they will go.

Were these subdomains duplicates of your main domain? If so you could try 301 redirecting them as this could speed the process up.

[erin_soc]

No they were not duplicates. They all just showed a soft 404 provided by goDaddy. We had wildcards turned on, but even so I don't understand how Google found these. They were just not used for anything ever i.e. vww.example.com

People have pointed to them as something wonky, so I'm trying to get rid of them in case they are hurting our site's overall performance in the SERP.

[DennisSeymour]

Ive seen this a couple times

It does go away eventually.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Unfortunately, Google may continue to keep those pages in its index for months, even if they return a 404. The 2 best options in these cases is usually:

1. Claim the profile in GWT - which would probably be possible but requires a lot of work with Godaddy configuring the subdomains just so you could claim the profile and de-index.
2. I haven't tried it, but Google introduced a URL removal tools for URLs you don't controll. Might be a good use case here. Here's some info: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/12/improving-url-removals-on-third-party.html