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When building websites I always do this on a test domain. This domain was subdomain of the main one. Now I have an issue. I forgot to make sure that bots wouldn't crawl the web page while developing.

So after finding out, I removed the page and the entire domain. Note that this was months ago. But now when I go on google and enter site:example.com I still get instances of the removed subdomain. This is despite that the website no longer exists. The domain doesn't exist either.

How is it still being found and how long does google take to realize the website doesnt exist anymore?

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  • What type of error do you get when you try to load pages from that domain? Is it a DNS resolution error, or a 404 page not found errer, or something else? – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Sep 3 '19 at 9:58
  • I get a Web Server's Default Page This page is generated by Plesk, the leading hosting automation software. You see this page because there is no Web site at this address. @StephenOstermiller – Kevin.a Sep 3 '19 at 10:17
  • Have you removed sub-domain.domain.com from your DNS? If you are hosting your domain names on your registrars site, this is where you want to delete it. If sub-domain.domain.com cannot resolve, this problem should end in time. Otherwise, not knowing Plesk at all, if you were using Apache, I would have you put something in the .htaccess file on the first site created to create a 410 error. It may be the Plesk page is keeping things alive - though I would expect that Google would eventually try and reindex the pages and the problem would be somewhat solved. It can take a long time. – closetnoc Sep 9 '19 at 20:05

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