Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP

[chiplab]

Good morning,

This is my first post.  I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below:

Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com).  On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP.

Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall.

Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index.

Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace  the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday.  If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again?

Thank you for your time,

Chase

[LoganRay]

Hi Chase,

Removing the subdomain within Search Console (WMT) will not remove the rest of your WWW URLs. Since you have different properties in Search Console for each, they are treated separately. That removal is only temporary though.

The most sure-fire way to ensure you don't get dev. URLs indexed is to put a NOINDEX tag on that entire subdomain. NOFOLLOW simply means that links on whatever page that tag is on won't be followed by bots.

Remember, crawling and indexing are different things. For example, if on your live www. site you had an absolute link somewhere in the mix that had dev.chiplab.com in it, since you presumably haven't nofollowed your live site, a bot will still access that page. The same situation goes for a robots.txt disallow. That only prevents crawling, not indexing. In theory, a bot can get to a disallowed URL and still index it. See this query for an example.

[mattdinbrooklyn]

The most ideal method would be to make the dev page password protected. What I would do is to 301 redirect the dev page to the subsequent correct site pages and then when the SERP refreshes, I'd make the dev site a password protected site.

[Shawn_Huber]

Just like Chase said, noindex your dev site to let the search engines know that it should not show in search. I do this on my dev sites everytime.

[eyepaq]

noindex would be the easiest way.

Seen some people having the same issue fixing it by adding rel canonical to dev pointing to the new site and so the main site got back step by step with no interruptions...

Cheers.

[chiplab]

Hi Logan,

Thanks for fast reply!

We did the following:

1. Added NOINDEX on the entire subdomain
2. Temporarily removed 'dev.chiplab.com' using Google Webmaster Tools
3. Password protected 'dev.chiplab.com'

As expected 'dev.chiplab.com' was removed from the SERP.  Now, I'm a bit worried that the link equity was transferred for good to the subdomain from 'www.chiplab.com'.  That's not possible, right?  Do we now just wait until GoogleBot crawls 'www.chiplab.com' and hope that it is restored to #1?

Thank you for your time (+Shawn, +Matt, +eyqpaq),

Chase

[LoganRay]

You should be all set# I wouldn't worry about link equity, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to keep an eye on your domain authority over the next few days.

[chiplab]

Hi Logan,

Last follow-up.  I swear.

Since I'm pretty new to this I got scared and cancelled the 'dev.chiplab.com' link removal request.  I did this because I didn't want to go up 14 days without any traffic (this is the estimated time I found that the Google SERP can take to be updated even though we "fetched as GoogleBot in GWT).  May be wrong on the SERP update time?

So what I did was add a 301 permanent redirect from 'dev.chiplab.com' to 'www.chiplab.com'. I've kept the NOFOLLOW/NOINDEX header on all 'dev' subdomains of course.  I've kept the DISALLOW in robots.txt for the dev.chiplab.com site specifically.  So now I just plan on doing work in the 'dev' site (because I can't test anything with the redirects happening).  And then hopefull in 14 days or so the domain name will change gracefully in the Google SERP from dev.chiplab.com to www.chiplab.com.  I did all of this because of how many sales we would lose if it took 14 days to start ranking again for this term.  Good?

Best,

Chase

[LoganRay]

No worries, that's what this community is here for!

Google views subdomains as different entities. They have different authority metrics and therefore different ranking power. Removing a URL on a subdomain won't have any affect on it's brother over on a different subdomain (for example: dev. and www.).

Good call to keep the disallow: / on the dev.chiplab.com/robots.txt file - I forgot to mention that you should leave it there, for anti-crawling purpose.

This is the query you'll want to keep an eye on. The info: operator is new and can be used to show you what Google has indexed as your 'canonical' homepage.

[eyepaq]

Hi Chase,

Removing dev via web master tools should do the trick for now. Then since google won't get to dev anymore you should be safe.

Adding both noindex and password protection is not needed. Since it's password protected Google won't get to see the noindex on the pages. So you should only do one of the two. No need to change now. The password protection is safe.

As expected 'dev.chiplab.com' was removed from the SERP.  Now, I'm a bit worried that the link equity was transferred for good to the subdomain from 'www.chiplab.com'.  That's not possible, right?

*** Yes, that's not possible so you are good.

Only 301 redirections are "mandatory" for Google to pass equity - so all good.