Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
-
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
-
It definitely will.
-
Really my main concern is the duplicate content issue. I think the 301 should solve it
-
Yes the 301 will solve it but not necessarily any quicker than the robots.txt update. It will still be indexed until Google crawls it again, which doesn't really matter too terribly (especially if you're redirecting)
Chances are your site won't populate for any high-volume keywords since it's new... And it would be de-indexed eventually if you blocked it from the robots. In any case, all of these options will work and you should be fine.
Good luck!
-
Unfortunately we took the site live before we realized that Google had somehow indexed the pages. So I think adding the 301 redirects should solve the problem. In the future I will add the noindex, no follow tag to each dev page. I will also password protect the dev. site.
-
That would be a good way to do it. The other way would be to block it in the robots.txt file on the root directory. Although be careful you aren't blocking both since it's a subdomain.
You could also add a noindex, nofollow tag to each dev page but then you have to remember to remove those when you push them live to your real domain.
I'd probably go with the Robots.txt option since using the redirect will not allow you to view the site live which I'm assuming would take away from the whole point of having this "staging" sub-domain.
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
-
Does Google index internal anchors as separate pages?
Hi, Back in September, I added a function that sets an anchor on each subheading (h[2-6]) and creates a Table of content that links to each of those anchors. These anchors did show up in the SERPs as JumpTo Links. Fine. Back then I also changed the canonicals to a slightly different structur and meanwhile there was some massive increase in the number of indexed pages - WAY over the top - which has since been fixed by removing (410) a complete section of the site. However ... there are still ~34.000 pages indexed to what really are more like 4.000 plus (all properly canonicalised). Naturally I am wondering, what google thinks it is indexing. The number is just way of and quite inexplainable. So I was wondering: Does Google save JumpTo links as unique pages? Also, does anybody know any method of actually getting all the pages in the google index? (Not actually existing sites via Screaming Frog etc, but actual pages in the index - all methods I found sadly do not work.) Finally: Does somebody have any other explanation for the incongruency in indexed vs. actual pages? Thanks for your replies! Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Google displaying "Items 1-9" before the description in the Search Results
We see our pages coming up in Google with the category page/product numbers in front of our descriptions. For example: Items 1 - 24 of 86 (and than the descriptions follows). Our website is magento based. Is there a fix for this that anyone knows of? Is there method of stopping Google from adding this on to the front of our Meta Description?
Technical SEO | | DutchG0 -
Does Google Parse The Anchor Text while Indexing
Hey moz fanz, I'm here to ask a bit technical and open-minding question.
Technical SEO | | atakala
In the Google's paper http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
They say they parse the page into hits which is basically word occurences.
But I want to know that they also do the same thing while keeping the anchor text database.
I mean do they parse the anchor text or keep it as it is .
For example, let's say my anchor text is "real car games".
When they indexing my link with anchor text, do they parse my anchor text as hits like
"real" distinct hits
"car" distinct hits
"games" distinct hits.
OR do they just use it as it is. As "real car games"0 -
"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?
Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0 -
Example of Google Indexing my Feedburner Links
As you can see, there are 2 results for the same page. One is the correct page URL, the other has the Feedburner parameters at the end: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/improving-user-engagement-with-the-right-blog-commenting-system.html http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/improving-user-engagement-with-the-right-blog-commenting-system.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Can this cause duplicate content issues? Can I prevent Google from indexing my Feedburner links? My Feedburner settings are already set to noindex, what else can I do?!? 22cfThX.png
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Website is not indexed in Google
Hi Guys, I have a problem with a website from a customer. His website is not indexed in Google (except for the homepage). I could not find anything that can possibly be the cause. I already checked the robots.txt, sitemap, and plugins on the website. In the HTML code i also couldn't find anything which makes indexing harder than usual. This is the website i am talking about: http://www.xxxx.nl/ (Dutch) The only thing that i am guessing now is the Google sandbox, but even that is quite unlikely. I hope you guys discover something i could not find! Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | B.Great0 -
Will Google index a site with white text? Will it give it bad ratings?
Will google not rank a site bc pretty much all the copy is white (and the background is all white)? Here's the site in question: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6w24f6h5p0zaxhg/Garrison_PLAY.vs2-static.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fwudppvwy2khpau/t43NozpG3E/Garrison_PLAY.vs3.jpg thanks--if you need me to clarify more let me know TM Humphries LocalSearched.com
Technical SEO | | CloudGuys0 -
I am trying to block robots from indexing parts of my site..
I have a few websites that I mocked up for clients to check out my work and get a feel for the style I produce but I don't want them indexed as they have lore ipsum place holder text and not really optimized... I am in the process of optimizing them but for the time being I would like to block them. Most of my warnings and errors on my seomoz dashboard are from these sites and I was going to upload the folioing to the robot.txt file but I want to make sure this is correct: User-agent: * Disallow: /salondemo/ Disallow: /salondemo3/ Disallow: /cafedemo/ Disallow: /portfolio1/ Disallow: /portfolio2/ Disallow: /portfolio3/ Disallow: /salondemo2/ is this all i need to do? Thanks Donny
Technical SEO | | Smurkcreative0