Dev Site Out of SERP But Still Indexed

[Kingof5]

One of our dev sites get indexed (live site robots.txt was moved to it, that has been corrected) 2-3 weeks ago. I immediately added it to our Webmaster Tools and used the Remove URL tool to get the whole thing out of the SERPs.

A site:devurl search in Google now returns no results, but checking Index Status in WMT shows 2,889 pages of it still indexed. How can I get all instances of it completely removed from Google?

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi David,

It sounds like you did everything right. As long as you cannot see the dev site in the live SERPs, you should be safe.

I have seen it take MONTHS for WMT to update any information regarding crawl stats, resolved errors, etc.

Just keep a close eye on things, but you should be safe if you can't find it by doing a Google search.

Hope this helps,

Mike

PS you may want to check Bing as well.

[RobMay]

As Mike said, it could take months for Google to remove all the indexed content from the DEV side (that was crawled and indexed). Looks like you did it all right too. I wouldn't worry, let it filter out. You won't be able to rush it any faster.

[CleverPhD]

Thumbs up on Mike and Robs comments.  What you may want to do is to setup a GWT account for the dev.website.ext and then go in and delete it from within GWT.  That will truly deep 6 it and then the robots.txt is the final blow.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663427

Just leave the form blank when you request removal and it removes the entire subdomain.  The robots.txt then makes sure it stays out.

[Kingof5]

See my original post - I did that and in its WMT it still shows pages indexed.

[RobMay]

Don'worry! It will take time. Google isn't lightning quick with drop requests or URL removals. They take time to filter out. Give it time and monitor it weekly to see they start to diminish

Cheers!