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How to remove my former sites off search engines?

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Feb 04.2016

Hello!

I have this little problem. A few years ago, I had couple of sites, then I closed them. But back then the search engines added those sites of mine into their databases. It’s Google and Chinese Baidu. And now their bots query my DNS server for non-existent sites. The complication is this… I’ve got a working website today. Let’s call it site.com And those non-existent sites are like that: forum.site.com (my site’s subdomains).

The traffic is not significant. But why to have it on a daily basis? As far as I see it, there are two ways to possibly deal with it:
a) An administrative way, ie., to contact somehow the search engines and ask them nicely to remove those sites off their db’s;
b.) A technical way, ie., to deal with it myself with some BIND9 configuration.
But I just don’t know how to approach the issue, frankly.

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SEO

3 Comments(s) ↴

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@richardstevensFeb 04.2016 — Method 1 – Contact Site Owner

Before you try anything else, you should definitely try to contact the site owner to see if they can have the information removed. You can find out the contact information for any website by looking it up in the WHOIS database. Here are three tools that might get you an email address or contact number for the registered person of the site:

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

http://whois.domaintools.com/

http://www.internic.net/whois.html

Some websites have private registration, which means you will see the contact information for a proxy company rather than for the individual. You should still go ahead and send an email as it is usually just forwarded to the site owner.

Method 2 – Contact Hosting Company

If someone is out to get you, they probably won’t respond to your requests to take down the content, so your next step is to try and contact the hosting company. I’ve had quite a few hosting companies take down content on my DCMA requests, mostly due to copyright violations. Your name probably won’t be cause enough for a DCMA request, but if the information that is posted about you is hateful or defaming or slanderous, you can pretty much guarantee that the site is violating the terms of service for that hosting company.

Most hosting companies are very helpful when it comes with spammers or abuse violations. Even if they can’t take down the content, they will usually send a warning email to the site owner about your issue.

You can easily find out who is hosting a website by reading my previous post. If you’re unlucky and find out the hosting company is sketchy and won’t help you, then you’ll have to skip this step and try another.

Method 3 – Outrank Bad Results

The last step would then be to try to bury the bad results as far down in the search results as possible. Most people don’t look past the first page of results when performing searches, but if someone is trying to find information about you specifically, they may go several pages deep. You’ll basically have to create as many good results as you can and hope they show up higher.

There are a couple of websites, services, tools, etc that you can use to accomplish this. First, let’s talk about what you can do yourself.
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@abrodskiauthorFeb 04.2016 — What question are you answering? I haven't said I'm getting spam or there's any kind of abuse or anything like that. I'm just saying that there's a minor DNS traffic which is not needed, since those couple of sites are not there anymore. That's all.
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@davidwarner033Feb 09.2016 — You could set up a single page on the subdomain with a message to users that the subdomain is no longer active, and they should access www.example.com instead. Provide a link for users to click through to the main site, and include <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> in the header for search engines to know that it's no longer available.

This option is the most helpful to both users and search engines.
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