Having possible problems with rankings due to development website
-
Hi all,
I've got an interesting issue and a bit of a technical challenge for you.
It's a bit complicated to explain, but please bear with me.
We have a client website (http://clientwebsite.com) which we are having a hard time ranking in the past few months. Main keywords simply don't show up in Top100 searches, even though we are constantly building backlinks through Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc.
Normally, we use ahrefs to look at the client's website backlinks, but just today we used Majestic to look at the backlink profile and one backlink stood out.
This is a backlink from a development server (http://developmentwebsite.com) which redirects to http://clientwebsite.com
The developers who were working on the redesign of the client website, put it up on their server and forgot to delete it.
Also, the content inside the development website is almost identical with the client website.We then checked to see if http://developmentwebsite.com is indexed.
It's not.Although, inside the robots file http://developmentwebsite.com/robots.txt there's:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
The funny (and weird thing) is that http://developmentwebsite.com/ and all development website inner pages are not indexed in Google.But if we go to http://developmentwebsite.com/inner-page, it doesn't redirect to the corresponding http://clientwebsite.com/inner-page, it's the same development website page URL and the pages even have links to the client website, but like I said, none of the pages of the development website are indexed, even though crawlers are allowed in the robots.txt's development website.
In your opinion, could this be the reason why we are having a hard time to rank the client website?
Second question is:
How do we approach in solving this issue?
Do we simply delete the whole http://developmentwebsite.com with all the inner pages?
Or should we do 301 redirrects on a per-page basis? -
the problem, might be about your template .
-
Thank you Jake, will definitely give this some thought.... Appreciate the help.
-
Recommending link development would be difficult without knowing more about your specific industry, competitive advantages, etc.
Generally speaking, you want to focus first on ensuring you have valuable assets capable of justifying new links to your site. This would be a variety of content types depending upon your business, but can range from Free Advice and How To Guides, Data Insights, Tools/Widgets, Detailed comparison/reviews, Interviews and insights from industry through leaders, etc. You can use methods like broken link building to identify new content opportunities that you can capitalize upon, or look at top linked pages on competitor sites to see the types of content that has earned their links.
Once you have established your linkable assets, you can begin the process of outreach and amplification to bring attention to those assets and earn natural links. Of course, you can always reach out to other thought leaders, cited sources, etc... to encourage some additional sharing, linking, etc.
You can also do link profile comparisons to see if there are reputable outlets citing your competitors but not mentioning you.
Those are just a few examples off the top of my head. If you have the resources to do link dev internally and just need strategy guidance, you should check out the Moz recommended list, as many of those agencies (I know ours does) will offer ad-hoc consultation to help your team get the systems in place to be successful with your link dev efforts.
Cheers,
Jake
-
Thanks, Jake. We've had the dev site removed.
As a side note, what link-building would you recommend if you think we should not be doing outreach / guest posting?
Cheers!
-
You have to search and replace the new sites URLs with the same consistent URL not from the dev server then block the dev server.
- search and replace the URLs in the new site.
- block the developer site with a password
First things first take Make sure you have all the images and code on the http://clientwebsite.com/
Then go to the new site and do a search and replace on all the URLs including the database.
Search for http://developmentwebsite.com & replace with http://clientwebsite.com
- https://www.funduc.com/search_replace.htm
- https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/
After doing this.
Go on to the development site and block URLs by password-protecting your server directories
Place a password on the site preventing it from being indexed by anything or even accessed without using the password.
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93708
- https://blogvault.net/how-to-block-google-from-indexing-your-wordpress-site/
You might want to check the header tags in the development site URLs. This would only be for curiosity you really want these things gone.
Did you check for
_(…)_ **X-Robots-Tag: noindex** _(…)_
Or no index meta tag in the section of your page:
Lastly, remove the offending URL's from Google if you must & follow this guide when launching sites.
I hope this helps,
Tom
-
You can also use Moz's Open Site Explorer to look at the spam scores of your incoming links.
-
Zakkyg, as previously mentioned, the problem may be the "building backlinks through Guest Posts and Profile links, and the type of links that you're building to the site. I would take one step further and run the site's links through Link Research Tools' Link Detox to make sure that the links to the site are good links and you're not building any toxic links.
I would also immediately take down the development site completely. Make it deliver 404 error pages, with all URLs. There's no need to set up redirects at all. Since it is an old dev site, it really shouldn't have any traffic or links to it--so I would just remove it.
-
Great question..
First... some of your rankings problem may be around this - "Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc."... at least 2 of those items carries some decent risk, the consequences of which would be "not ranking". Have you checked search console to see if any manual actions exist? Did you have rankings and they disappeared, or have you been unable to secure rankings in general? Does the site currently get organic traffic, but just maybe on terms that you aren't targeting?
As far as the development site, this could easily be a separate issue from your rankings, and I would doubt this would cause significant rankings drops if the dev site isn't being indexed by Google. Would you be lucky enough to have any type of access to this through a CMS login? If so, you could easily verify the site in search console and see where things stand in terms of indexing. Additionally, if you could access through the CMS, you might be able to change a few settings, such as canonical tags, "website" or discourage indexing (if wordpress), etc. .that would cause the site to begin redirecting to your clientwebsite.com or at least give the indication that it is a known copy.. Did you check the individual pages of the site to see if a meta tag is in place on the pages blocking robots?
Ultimately the easiest thing regarding the dev site would be to simply ask the dev company to remove the site...
Cheers,
Jake
-
I would do the redirect to be safe then in the future make sure you run noindex on any development sites.
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?
After a site audit, I find out that my website don't have a robot.txt. Does it hurt my website rankings? One more thing, when I type mywebsite.com/robot.txt, it automatically redirect to the homepage. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Problem with Duplicate Page Wordpress
Hi all My name is Riccardo and i work for a web agency. I'am working on a new client website and i have found this kind of errors through MOZ (Image 1). I checked all the URLs; they work and they remind to the Homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advmedialab
The website is made with Wordpress. I have already tried to solve this problem with 301 redirect but, as i supposed, it didn't work.
I think that is a problem related to Wordpress URL in Wordpress settings (Image 2). However i would like to know if anybody had the same problem or if there are other possibile causes. Thank you in advance! zDVL0pj aB7MeGe0 -
Not Ranking - Any Tips?
Hi guys, I have a client site that I've recently come onboard with that was published late last year, not really optimized for anything, and in a moderately, but not very, competitive, search space. Early April we optimized the home page and a couple of other pages and have since built about 5-6 (high quality, partial match) links to it, and a press release was done mid last month. The only other thing we did was change the site from non-www to www and set this as the preferred domain in Search Console. Over 6 weeks since that all began, and we're still not on the radar at all for any of our main keywords - nowhere. The only thing we are really ranking for is our brand name, but this is the wrong (press release, not home!) page, and it's bouncing a lot. All of the pages seem to be indexed, and we are ranking for one other (inconsequential) keyword, but 99 is the highest it has reached. An SEO friend told me to build some citations, but this is not a local business, nor are we trying to rank locally. Can anyone please suggest why it might be taking so long, and what else I could try? I imagine more links will help, but results from our outreach are hard to predict, so if there were another safe link type that could help me figure out whether this domain is in trouble or not ASAP, that would be ideal. Thanks very much in advance for any help you can provide. Ulla
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Brand in Title Tag - a Ranking Factor for Scaling Big Websites?
I'm in the middle of redesigning title tags on a large ecommerce site - approximately 9000 product pages. The old structure was -(product name/description) | (Website/Brand) So an example would be - Big League Chew - 13 oz. | Target - With 'Target' Being the site's brand and appearing on each. With Google's new Title Tag display, our title tags are too long now. Unfortunately, our Brand/Website is HUGE - over 18 characters. My question is two fold - 1. Is it OK to remove brand from the title tags of some particularly long names? Will this impact ranking? 2. Does Google look for brand in these title tags, and more specifically: brand consistency in title tags? I'd love to cut the brand out of some as the product name is the biggest click-through element by far - but I don't want to affect rankings. My 'gut' says that I should focus on clickthrough rate with title tags and cut brand where necessary. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blenny0 -
Drop in rankings
Our keyword rankings have dropped greatly since July'12. Our site used to be in the top 8 rankings for the most competitive keywords on our industry and now rank 30+. Being new to this industry any help would be greatly appreciated. www.fragileremovals.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Backlinks from one website to my 3 websites (hosted in 1 c-block) ?
We are making some linkbuilding. And have very nice backlinks offer. So we are planning to put our 3 websites in it. Our 3 websites are on separate IP, but same C-block. Can it be a red flag for google? Can i put my 3 backlinks in one blog post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Internal page ranking
If I have a domain: Example.com I want this domain to rank for several keywords. I build a page on the domain called Example.com/glasses If I SEO the page Example.com/glasses with backlinks etc... will that URL come up on google or will it simply bring Example.com up on the SERPS. If I have three keywords, should I make a subpage for each page and SEO that page? Will that make the domain rank for all three keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790