I'm working on a website that's normally accessed trough a load-balance. But we also have direct URL to each server.
Lately, Google started to index the direct URLs to our servers, which is bad because we don't want our user to go directly to each server (if some server is taken down for maintenance).
We've correct canonical link tags pointing to the load-balance URL. All links in the sitemap.xml point to the load-balance URL. So we have no idea how Google got a hand on the direct server URLs.
To be extra clear:
Our load-balance is foo.com
. All the links on the site use this URL. So does the sitemap and canonical-tags.
But Google still indexes foo.server01.webhost.com
and foo.server02.webhost.com
We cannot add 301-redirects from foo.server**.webhost.com
to foo.com
due to various reasons.
Do I have to verify that I own all the URLs in Google Search Console? Or am I missing out some other settings?
foo.server01.webhost.com
- so the URL is exposed? Or is this rewritten internally (using a proxy)? "Do I have to verify that I own all the URLs in Google Search Console?" - it was my understanding that the target of a cross-domain canonical should also be a verified property in GSC, however, I can't find a reference for this at the moment. Note that the rel="canonical" is only advisory so there is no guarantee that Google will use it.