(Entry was posted by Micah Fisher-Kirshner on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 12/05/2019).

Setting an appropriate status code

Company set their subdomains that used to resolve on anything (some of which Google found) to "domain doesn`t exist" which generates no status codes.How does Googlebot handle this? Should it be set to an appropriate status code or will Google drop those subdomains as is?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

JL Faverio: Just so I understand correctly, is this what displays on those subdomains? https://www.leducanddexterplumbing.com/march19/blog/page/4/
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: JL Faverio no. It`s not 410 gone.

Just type something random as your subdomain to generally see what is going on
JL Faverio: Ah like this https://sfsd.facebook.com/
JL Faverio: Ok sorry to attack your post here as I do not have a qualified answer for ya. :D
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Yeah. Heh
Richard Hearne: https://sfsd.facebook.com/ has no DNS entry. If google indexed content on subdomains that did previously resolve, but no longer have any DNS, that content should fall out of index when Googlebot recrawls and sees no DNS.
Federico Sasso: TLDR: I wouldn`t bother about not having a status code.

Google will simply drop them out of their index (sorry, no reference to point to, but I`m quite sure of it).

Very likely it already ignored them using the canonical one if indicated, or electing one - usually www. or the naked url - as canonical. Of course, if instead they showed up in SERP, it was a duplicate content issue (sorry for stating the obvious, for the sake of more inexperienced readers).
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Federico Sasso thanks!
Loren Baker: Hmm. Did you check for inbound links to the site from competitors who may have linked to porn., viagra. ...etc sub-domains?
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Haha, it`s more the settings they had that allowed any to resolve. But yes, I checked on the inbound links too.
Michael Martinez: If it generates a DNS error then I would expect Google to periodically attempt to recrawl the missing subdomain to see if it comes back. They should eventually drop it from the search results as Federico says, but Google may remember the subdomains for years to come.