Blocking Subdomain from Google Crawl and Index

[JesusD]

Hey everybody, how is it going?

I have a simple question, that i need answered.

I have a main domain, lets call it domain.com. Recently our company will launch a series of promotions for which we will use cname subdomains, i.e try.domain.com, or buy.domain.com. They will serve a commercial objective, nothing more.

What is the best way to block such domains from being indexed in Google, also from counting as a subdomain from the domain.com. Robots.txt, No-follow, etc?

Hope to hear from you,

Best Regards,

[odmsoft]

Hello George, Thank you for fast answer! I read that article and there is some issue with that. if you can see at it, i'd really appreciate it. So the problem is that if i do it directly from Tumblr, it will also block it from Tumblr users. Here is the note right below that option "Allow this blog to appear in search results":
"This applies to searches on Tumblr as well as external search engines, like Google or Yahoo."

Also, if i do it from GWT, i'm very concerned to remove URLs with my subdomain because i afraid it will remove all my domain. For example, my domain is abc.com and the Tumblr blog is setup on tumblr.abc.com. So i afraid if i remove tumblr.abc.com from index, it will also remove my abc.com. Please let me know what you think.

Thank you!

[webmethod]

Hi Marina,

If I understand your question correctly, you just don't want your Tumblr blog to be indexed by Google. In which case these steps will help: http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/keep-tumblr-off-google-3061.html

Regards,

George

[odmsoft]

Hi guys, I read your conversation. I have similar issue but my situation is slightly different. I'll really appreciate if you can help with this. So i have also a subdomain that i don't want to be indexed by Google. However, that subdomain is not in my control. I mean, i created subdomain on my hosting but it is pointing to my Tumblr blog. So i don't have access to its robot txt. So can anybody advise what can i do in this situation to noindex that subdomain?

Thanks

[webmethod]

Personally I wouldn't rely just on robots.txt, as one accidental, public link to any of the pages (easier than you may think!) will result in Google indexing that subdomain page (it just won't be followed). This means that the page can get "stuck" in Google's index and to resolve it you would need to remove it using WMT (instructions here). If there were a lot of pages accidentally indexed, you would need to remove the robots.txt restriction so Google can crawl it, and put a noindex/nofollow tags on the page so Google drops it from its index.

To cut a long story short, I would do both Steps 1 and 2 outlined by Federico if you want to sleep easy at night :).

George

[Kingof5]

It would also be smart to add the subdomains in Webmaster Tools in case one does get indexed and you need to remove it.

[OnlineAssetPartners]

Robots.txt is easiest and quickest way. As a back up you can use the Noindex meta tag on the pages in the subdomain

[FedeEinhorn]

2 ways to do it with different effects:

1. Robots.txt in each subdomain. This will entirely block any search engine to even access those pages, so they won't know what they have inside.

   User-Agent:*

   Disallow: /

2. noindex tags in those pages. This method allows crawlers to read the page and maybe index (if you set a "follow") the pages to which you link to.or "nofollow" if you don't want the linked pages to be indexed either.

Hope that helps!