There's this weird issue that's been keeping me wondering what's happening. I apologize for the lack of specificity, but I need to abide to a strict NDA policy. So here goes my question:
Is there any way to pinpoint the source of redirection that's occurring when accessing a no-more-existing subdomain of a website that I'm managing?
Basically, http://oldsubdomain.example.com
is being redirected to http://example.com
. Moreover, Google doesn't allow me to remove it (through Search Console) from their search database specifically because of this redirection.
Despite the fact that the subdomain - which used to be in place many years ago - was deleted at some point a few years back and hasn't been used ever since, Google still seems to have it cached. However, the title, as well as the description of the search result snippet are identical to the main domain name result, i.e. by googling for http://oldsubdomain.example.com
, I'm getting exactly the same result as when searching http://example.com
.
Yes, I did search and couldn't find any directives in .htaccess
that may cause such redirection, I also made sure (by checking under cPanel subdomain settings) that the subdomain doesn't exist. There are also no DNS records related to that obsolete subdomain in Cloudflare.
To sum it all up, how could I see exactly what is causing the redirection? I just want to disable it so that I can ask Google to remove the http://oldsubdomain.example.com
search result.