Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index

[SarahLK]

Hey guys,

I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere.  I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains.  Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index.  However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com."  Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index?  Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone.

This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution.

Any suggestions would be a huge help.  Thanks!!

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Sarah. Have you put in 301 redirects in the htaccess file for these subdomains? You may want to consider going through the change of address tool in Google Webmaster Tools as well.  The problem seems to be that Google crawled and indexed the old subdomains and still has references to the old pages that existed on them. Ultimately using NOINDEX on development sites and then using a catchall 301 redirect should help clean this up for you. Cheers!

[SarahLK]

Ryan,

Thanks for your quick response!  The reason we aren't doing 301s or noindex on these sites is that they no longer exist.  We would have to essentially resurrect these dev sites for the sole purpose of redirecting.  Since Google's cached version is the new/current url wouldn't that imply that they are aware of the change and the subdomains are hanging around for another reason?

We typically noindex dev sites but a couple of them slipped by without.

[RyanPurkey]

Right. I get that they don't exist on your site currently, but when they did Google indexed them so they exist in some form within Google, but Google had never been told they had permanently moved (via 301). The good news is that you don't have to resurrect the entire site. You can simply modify the appropriate file (htaccess if you're on Apache, IIS if Window's server) and make certain that Google knows any page it's looking for at devsite.yoursite.com is now at www.correcturl.com.  Cheers!