How is Google finding our preview subdomains?
-
I've noticed that Google is able to find, crawl and index preview subdomains we set up for new client sites (e.g. clientpreview.example.com). I know now to use "meta name="robots" and robots.txt) to block the search engines from crawling these subdomains. My question though, is how is Google finding these subdomains? We don't link to these preview domains from anywhere else, so I can't figure out how Google is even getting there.
Does anybody have any insight on this?
-
Thanks for your response Irving. We put some of our preview sites on subdomains of our main domain, but then remove them after the site goes live, so their shouldn't be any duplicate content issues. The main question is just how Google is finding these subdomains.
-
Thanks for the insight guys.
-
I don't specifically use the Google Toolbar, but others in the office may (although I don't think so). It sounds like Chrome could be a potential source as well?
-
I think that this is a good idea. But you gotta be careful.
Our competitor (who ranked #1 and we ranked at #2) had their site redesigned and the design company included the noindex on every page. They forgot to take it off when the new design went live. It took them quite a while to figure it out and we enjoyed all of their sales for about a month.
We are #1 now and they are #2. Must have been a bad design job.
-
If the subdomains are added to WMT google will know about it. if you are designing sites for clients and putting them on your site as subdomains it behooves you to make sure 100% that their dev sites are not being seen by Google. It's duplicate content and your subdomain is the original source of this content. Looks unprofessional too
a) verify any subdomain you are creating for a client in WMT
b) block it in robots.txt and noindex nofollow all pages globally
c) for the ones that are already indexed, go into google WMT and go into that subdomain account and request removal of the site in Googles index. This will remove the indexing for that subdomain only don't worry it won't remove your main site from the index.
-
I would also consider adding a noindex tag if you want the urls removed.
-
I agree with Mat. You never know, but yes Chrome could be another major source. It also depends what you set as your privacy when you setup Chrome (Send anonymous usage data to Google, Yes/No ?) and so on.
-
We usually put them behind an .htaccess login now. We've had situations where the development site have been outranking the live site. Great demo of the power of on-site optimisation, but still a bit annoying for the client.
People used to always blame google toolbar for this. Likewise using chrome could potentially add something to the "to crawl" list. I wonder what the respective privacy policies say about that. I've also seen staging sites pick up links. When an external link on the staging site has been clicked it has alerted someone else, appeared as a link back/trackback etc.
-
The discovery can be from multiple mediums. Do you or the client have Google Toolbar installed ?
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
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Recovering from a Google penalty
Hi there, So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage. I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site. I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out. Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell. From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?). I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing. I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase. Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Will
Technical SEO | | wsmith7270 -
Site:www.domainname.com - does not find homepage in Google (only inner pages - why?)
When I do a Google search on site:www.domainname.com, my clients homepage does not appear. Other inner pages do. The same thing happend a while ago and I did 'fetch by google' in Search Console. After that the homepage was indexed again when I did a site:www.domainname.com search. But now (2 weeks later), it's gone again. When I search on the brand name of the website in Google it does find the homepage. I don't know why it doesn't find the homepage when I do a site: search. Any ideas? [see images where you can see the problem] XTrDn 2doHF
Technical SEO | | robk1230 -
Hello any body abouth google disllowtools
hi any body ..i have one importan domian have google penguen take it before 2 years i have sibmit 127 links on google disllow tools to remove that links this tools can take me out from google penguen ? how long will get to remove 127links ?can relolve trafik hope so regards jivko
Technical SEO | | jivkojelazkov0 -
Prevent Google Web Preview bot from seeing pop-up,m bad for SEO?
Hey guys, On our website, we have a lightbox pop-up showing an external page with an e-mail newsletter signup form. It it shown to some 5% of our visitors and works with a cookie to prevent the popup from showing at each visit. Recently, I saw the popup displayed in the Google SERP instant preview, for every page. The preview looks messed up. We could prevent the popup to be shown to the google web preview bot by blocking this user agent. Question is: Will it hurt our SEO? Because we show the web preview bot (not the crawl bot) something different than what a visitor may see BQrS7 BQrS7.jpg
Technical SEO | | Webprint0 -
Change in how Google displays SERPs
Hi All, Recently our SERPs have changed in Google results to show product prices from our pages rather than the meta description. This just started to happen in November with no change (that we know of) on our side. I have attached a from and to SERP image if that helps. Does any one have any ideas as its starting to effect our rankings? Thanks, Tony. Tkeou,6jg6Q Tkeou,6jg6Q#1
Technical SEO | | tstauntonwri0 -
Google Webmaster tools error?
So I am trying to set the URL preference in google webmaster tools for my site. However when I try to save it it tells me to verify that I own the site. I have already done this so where can I go to verify I own the site exactly? Maybe I am wrong and I have not done this already but even on the homepage of webmaster tools I don't see an option to "verify".
Technical SEO | | ENSO0 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0