How to remove subdomains in a clean way?

[Gaolga]

Hello,

I have a main domain example.com where I have my main content and then I created 3 subdomains one.example.com, two.example.com and three.example.com

I think the low ranking of my subdomains is affecting the ranking of my main domain, the one I care the most. So, I decided to get rid of the subdomains.

The thing is that only for one.example.com I could transfer the content to my main domain and create 301 redirects. For the other two subdomains I cannot integrate the content in my main domain as it doesn't make sense.

Whats the cleanest way to make them dissapear? (just put a redirect to my main domain even if the content is not the same) or just change the robots to "noindex" and put a 404 page in the index of each subdomain.

I want to use the way that will harm the least the performance with Google.

Regards!

[seomozinator]

Hello, Olga.

If you want to simply remove it (or at least tell Google bots that it's removed), use "410 Gone" status, not 404. For user experience, I'd redirected those subdomains to index page of domain, or, if you have time and resources, create a landing page, saying something like "Sorry for inconvenience, the content is not there anymore, use search to find whatever you need ", add a search bar of main domain content, viola!

Hope this helps.