Staging site - Treated as duplicate?
-
Last week (exactly 8 days ago to be precise) my developer created a staging/test site to test some new features. The staging site duplicated the entire existing site on the same server.
To explain this better -My site address is - www.mysite.com
The path of the new staging site was www.mysite/staging
I realized this only today and have immediately restricted robot text and put a no index no follow on the entire duplicate server folder but I am sure that Google would have indexed the duplicate content by now?
So far I do not see any significant drop in traffic but should I be worried? and what if anything can I do at this stage?
-
Yes, it would show up in your analytics as an active user but the fact that the query returns no results means it's not been indexed. All good.
Peter
-
Hey Peter,
The Analytics code could have helped to get the site indexed. Or even a G +1/Facebook Like/share/Stumble/etc button clicked by error.
@Rajat
Doing the search Peter suggested should return any indexed page.
-
Got it. No, no results show up but interestingly when I go to www.mysite.com/staging, it does show up as 1active user on analytic report, which is what got me worried and made me realize of this problem.
-
Hi Rajat,
No what I mean is put the following query into the search box
site:<yourdomainname>/<yourstagingfolder></yourstagingfolder></yourdomainname>
where yourdomainname is your domain name (e.g. mysite.com) and yourstagingfolder is your staging folder (e.g. staging), so ike this:
site:mysite.com/staging
Peter
-
Thanks Pete. When I search for mysite.com/staging on google, I only see mysite.com as first result...and nothing at all on staging. Is that what you mean I should check?
-
Hi Rajat
The analytics code may have given some signals to Google of pages to index but to test it the staging server's pages are in Google use site:mysite.com/staging (NB. no spaces between site and the domain name).
Peter
-
Thanks Federico. That's re-assuring. Also, a related point, since the whole site was duplicated, so was the Google analytic code.
Does that have any impact?
Also, is there a way to check if the test server was in fact indexed or not?
-
Hi Rajat
I agree with Federico. Also, if there was no active link on mysite.com to mysite.com/staging then it's unlikely Google would have found it unless the staging site had been submitted to Google via a sitemap for indexing. You should be fine.
Peter
-
You have done the necessary steps (disallowing in robots plus setting a noindex tag). There's shouldn't be anything to worry about. If you want to be entirely sure, you can add some HTTP authentication to the folder so only those knowing the credentials can access (you could find that some robots may not follow the disallow flag or noindex tag).
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
-
Our Sites Organic Traffic Went Down Significantly After The June Core Algorithm Update, What Can I Do?
After the June Core Algorithim Update, the site suffered a loss of about 30-35% of traffic. My suggestions to try to get traffic back up have been to add metadata (since the majority of our content is lacking it), as well ask linking if possible, adding keywords to alt images, expanding and adding content as it's thin content wise. I know that from a technical standpoint there are a lot of fixes we can implement, but I do not want to suggest anything as we are onboarding an SEO agency soon. Last week, I saw that traffic for the site went back to "normal" for one day and then saw a dip of 30% the next day. Despite my efforts, traffic has been up and down, but the majority of organic traffic has dipped overall this month. I have been told by my company that I am not doing a good job of getting numbers back up, and have been given a warning stating that I need to increase traffic by 25% by the end of the month and keep it steady, or else. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it realistic and/or possible to reach that goal?
Algorithm Updates | | NBJ_SM2 -
Duplicate website got indexed: Caused rank drop?
Hi all, We have replica of our website with exact pages and content. That website got indexed by mistake and allowed for bots for more than 10 days. Our ranking dropped now and we moved from 2nd page to 5th page. But previously we had this happened and didn't hurt much. We got punished now? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google & Site Architecture
Hi I've been reading the following article about Google's quality signals here: https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/10/10/guide-to-google-ranking-signals-part-6-trust-authority-and-expertise/?utm_source=Search+Engine+Watch&utm_campaign=464594db7c-11_10_2016_NL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e118661359-464594db7c-17828341 They mention - 3) All your categories should be accessible from the main menu. All your web pages should be labelled with the relevant categories. Is this every category? We have some say 3 levels deep, and they aren't all in the menu. I'd like them to be, so would be good to make a case for it. Thank you
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey1 -
Are there any alternative ranking strategies for not a blog site other than on site SEO, speed improvement, building backlinks and social media engagement to improve rankings?
We own a horoscope website and looking for some SEO advice.However most of the websites are blog sites therefore most of the SEO content is about how to rank a blog site better. IE getting new quality content, use anchor text link out etc. However if your site is different by nature it is hard to find good advice on how to rank better in these scenarios. I would like to know if there are alternative ways of increasing rankings apart from the usual strategies of improving social media fan pages, building backlinks and optimising the site speed wise and making it accessible and understandable to crawlers and people too.
Algorithm Updates | | websitebuilder0 -
Top resulting sites sites for a specific keyword
I'm teaching myself SEO so that I can speak more intelligently to it with my clients. I've spent a great deal of time on seomoz and love it. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know and that brings me to my current question. I can search on a keyword and see results, however I see every URL available. I'm looking for a simple way to see the root domains for the top 100-500 resulting websites for a specific keyword. Is there an easy way to get this information I'm sure it's right in front of me, but I can't find it. Many thanks, ahossom
Algorithm Updates | | ahossom0 -
Why some sites doesn't get ranked in Google but in Bing and Yahoo
Few of my sites e.g. Business-Training-Schools.com and Ultrasoundtechnicians.com doesnt get much visits from Google but these sites get top ranked in Bing and Yahoo. I have tried searching for answer to these question but i did not find anything convincing.
Algorithm Updates | | HQP2 -
Should I use canonical tags on my site?
I'm trying to keep this a generic example, so apologies if this is too vague. On my main website, we've always had a duplicate content issue. The main focus of our site is breaking down to specific, brick and mortar locations. We have to duplicate the description of product/service for every geographic location (this is a legal requirement). So for example, you might have the parent "product/service" page targeting the term, and then 100's of sub pages with "product/service San Francisco", "product/service Austin", etc. These pages have identical content except for the geographic location is dynamically swapped out. There is also additional useful content like google map of area, local resources, etc. As I said this was always seen as an SEO issue, specifically you could see in the way that googlebot would crawl pages and how pagerank flowed through the site that having 100's of pages with identical copy and just swapping out the geographic location wasn't seen as good content, however we still always received traffic and conversions for the long tail geographic terms so we left it. Las year, with Panda, we noticed a drop in traffic and thought it was due to this duplicate issue so I added canonical tags to all our geographic specific product/service pages that pointed back to the parent page, that seemed to be received well by google and traffic was back to normal in short order. However, recently what I notice a LOT in our SERP pages is if I type in a geographic specific term, i.e. "product/service san francisco", our deep page with the canonical tag is what google is ranking. Google inserts its own title tag on the SERP page and leaves the description blank as it doesn't index the page due to the canonical tag on the page. Essentially what I think it is rewarding is the site architecture which organizes the content to the specific geo in the URL: site.com/service/location/san-francisco. Other than that there is no reason for it to rank that page. Sorry if this is lengthy, thanks for reading all of that! Essentially my question is, should I keep the canonical tags on the site or take them off since Google insists on ranking the page? If I am ranking already then the potential upside to doing that is ranking higher (we're usually in the 3-6 spot on the result page) and also higher CTR because we can get a description back on our resulting page. The counter argument is I'm already ranking so leave it and focus on other things. Appreciate your thoughts on this!
Algorithm Updates | | edu-SEO0 -
Are you seeing changes in your sites today? Panda 2.2?
I've heard rumblings of some Panda sites recovering in the last few days and wondered if the talked about Panda 2.2 has been rolled out. My own site (which actually had a significant boost after Panda) has seen a significant increase in traffic today (started about noon EST yesterday) and a nice increase in Adsense revenue as well. How are your sites doing?
Algorithm Updates | | MarieHaynes1