Should I let Google crawl my production server if the site is still under development?
-
I am building out a brand new site. It's built on Wordpress so I've been tinkering with the themes and plug-ins on the production server. To my surprise, less than a week after installing Wordpress, I have pages in the index.
I've seen advice in this forum about blocking search bots from dev servers to prevent duplicate content, but this is my production server so it seems like a bad idea.
Any advice on the best way to proceed? Block or no block? Or something else? (I know how to block, so I'm not looking for instructions).
- We're around 3 months from officially launching (possibly less).
- We'll start to have real content on the site some time in June, even though we aren't planning to launch.
- We should have a development environment ready in the next couple of weeks.
Thanks!
-
Thank you for the detailed response, Paul. I'll get cracking on your suggestions.
I was mostly worried that if I blocked it now, it would be mad at me later. You've given me a way to deal with the bot concerns.
I am less concerned that anyone will find these pages. I only knew about their index status because of one of my monitoring services which alerted me that google was crawling.
-
Thanks for the confirmation, Dan! Looks like you're up & working early on a Sunday morning
-
In my opinion, no, you definitely should NOT allow the production server to be indexed while it's in this state. For all intents and purposes it IS your dev server at the moment, and the last thing you want is for the search crawlers to think that what's there will be representative of the quality of your site when it's finished.
My recommendation:
- get the current site out of the SERPs. (Use WordPress setting in Settings -> Read to check the "Discourage from indexing" box. DON'T add a no-index in robots.txt until the pages have all dropped out of the SERPs)
- when the dev site goes into operation, make _certain_right from the start it cannot be crawled (vastly better than trying to fix the problem after it get's accidentally indexed).
- as soon as you have time, build a proper front page and a few content pages on the production site that indicate what the full site will be about, and get some strong basic, well-written content on there that will also remain after the go-live. (keep ALL the rest of the pages of the prod site out of the SERPs with meta no-index tags)
- once you have a the new, stable, basic content up on prod, allow the SEs to start indexing it.
This gets the messy stuff out of the SERPs before it can pollute the index (and gives you a bad reputation with any actual visitors to the site who shouldn't be seeing your tinkering). By getting some real content as soon as possible, even on a very basic template, you'll start giving the SEs a quality idea of what is to come. Wouldn't hurt to start building a few backlinks once the basic content is up on prod - e.g. links from its new social profiles etc.
This way, when the full site goes live, you'll already have some quality visibility in the engines, so it will be quicker to get the rest of the new site crawled and indexed.
Does that make sense?
Paul
P.S. If at all appropriate, use the basic prod content to show why/how they should connect with you on social media, and offer them a chance to sign up for your newsletter notification of when the site goes live. (It's never too early to start trying to get those subscribers!)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Competitor on same server (so 2 domains in same branche on same server, also same technique)
Hi, To holding of a client of ours, has bought the webshop from a competitor. They have moved the domain of the competitor to their own server, and also changed the technique so both sites have the same CMS and also same technique on the front-end.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dennis1992038
How bad is this for SEO? Should they change from server ASAP and are there solutions to do stay on the same server but use something like an CDN? Looking forward to your thoughts. Thanks!0 -
I want to do tracking of normal product and sample product conversion separately in google adwords
Hi Experts, I am doing adwords conversion tracking via GTM all working fine. Now I want to track few products which I sell as Sample products whose product SKU is "Sample" so I want to see conversion of sample products and other products separately. Also when anyone purchase sample product and regular product then both tag should fire separately. So how can I create tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsouzac0 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Our site is on a secure server (https) will a link to http:// be of less value?
Our site is hosted on a secure network (I.E. Our web address is - https://www.workbooks.com). Will a backlink pointing to: http://www.workbooks.com provide less value than a link pointing to: https://www.workbooks.com ? Many thanks, Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz0 -
How to know if your site has been penalized by Google
Hello, One of my clients ranking drop dramatically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ogdcorp
We believe it was due to an upgrade to his site. While the site was live www.clientdomain.com
Work was being done on the new site www.clientdomain.com/new (1 month) I think google crawled the /new link and took as a content duplication since both sites had the same content. Is there a MOZ tool to see if a site has been penalized or any online tool? Thanks0 -
Sanitary ware and accessories site with 1000s duplicate product titles.
sanitary ware and accessories site with 1000s duplicate product titles.as it in title.there are around 1400 links index in Google and many of them duplicate title tags duplicate meta description .many of them are just a products pages .i am looking a solution for making these correct .site equipped with CMS also.but there are no facility to enter meta details except just a tile and price. What can i do to solve this problem ? If i no index products pages will it effect to SERP ? Is it ok to create separate landing pages for each kews using HTML static pages like www.mysite.com/sanitary ware.html expert advices need <colgroup><col width="166"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity
| sanitary ware |0 -
Google Freshness Update & Ecommerce Site Strategies
Just curious what other ecommerce SEO's are doing to battle fresh content. We've been having our clients work on internal blogs, adding articles one click away from landing pages, and implement product reviews when possible but I don't know that it's enough. Our bigger customers have landing pages (usually category pages) with very competitive keywords. So my main issue is what to do with fresh content on category pages.. I've toyed with the idea of having the landing page content re written every now and then. We used to use a blog parser to bring snippits of comments from the blog into landing pages but I believe that to be a problem with duplicate content. News snippits from other sites don't seem beneficial either. Anyone have any other ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0