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
-
Site´s Architecture - Categories . What´s the best in my case?
My Dear friends of MOZ, I´ve got you a case that has been driving me crazy for 2 weeks, Im doing an SEO audit for big brand that sells electronics. Since they sell all kind of electronics, and are very popular the site is quite big and has several categories. Now...Im working particularly in a kind of micro-site that sells two kind of products that are very similar but not the same. Lets say in this site they are selling super-light-weight-Laptops and tablets, so if you look the site its a Laptop/Tablet site. But the site is not under a laptop/tablet directory, some pages are under laptop and others in Tablet directory . For example : Home page URL: /light-laptops/home.asp ; Products general page page URL is light-pads/products.asp ; and each single product page is under laptops or pads according the type of product. From my point of view, they should create a new directory called /light-laptops-pads/ and single directories for products, and case studies, etc.. Since they want to show both products together when you click in products (off course they will be creating sub-directories for the two types of products). At the begining I thought they were really mistaken, but now that I see that all light-pad content is in one folder and light-laptops content is in another, and the site jumps from one category to the other I am a little bit confused. PLEASE HELP ME PD: I want to make clear that general categories like products, case studies , contact us, solutions pages are in some cases under /light-pad/ directory and in other cases under /light-laptops / directory PLEASE PARDON MY ENGLISH!
Algorithm Updates | | facupp10 -
Site titles / descriptions change - Google Algo Change ?
Hello, During the weekend 4 of our sites automatically changed their search titles and descriptions at the same time.
Algorithm Updates | | lordish
They are not picking up the real pages: Title, Description. Our ranks are dropping because of this. can you please tell if it happened to you as well or if you recognize a problem here? sites:
http://www.robinhoodbingo.com
http://www.gossipbingo.com
http://www.moonbingo.com in the attached examples:
for the kws searched - the results show different titles and descriptions. results for these pages:
moon bingo - http://www.moonbingo.com
mobile bingo - http://www.robinhoodbingo.com/skin/mobile.php rhMzURw.png 2tRL5dZ.png0 -
How big is the effect of having your site hosted in the country you're targeting?
Other than having a ccTLD domain and assigning your target country in Google Webmaster Tools' "geotargeting" feature, how big is the effect of having your site hosted in the country you're targeting? Is it really necessary? or it is just a small signal? Thanks in advance! 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | esiow20131 -
Does having a few URLs pointing to another url via 301 "create" duplicate content?
Hello! I have a few URLs all related to the same business sector. Can I point them all at my home domain or should I point them to different relevant content within it? Ioan
Algorithm Updates | | IoanSaid1 -
Old Site But No Traffic - Can Anyone Tell Reason ?
Hi , Can anyone please tell me why this site http://www.travelscience.com is not getting any traffic? Its 13 years old domain having 2340 indexed pages and Its Alexa rank is 6186158 Can anyone please identity the problems with it. I found it from Google doing the keyword research on the Travel topics. I am curious to know the potential problem with this site. Thanks in advance for your time. Regards
Algorithm Updates | | kywebsol0 -
Why does Google say they have more URLs indexed for my site than they really do?
When I do a site search with Google (i.e. site:www.mysite.com), Google reports "About 7,500 results" -- but when I click through to the end of the results and choose to include omitted results, Google really has only 210 results for my site. I had an issue months back with a large # of URLs being indexed because of query strings and some other non-optimized technicalities - at that time I could see that Google really had indexed all of those URLs - but I've since implemented canonical URLs and fixed most (if not all) of my technical issues in order to get our index count down. At first I thought it would just be a matter of time for them to reconcile this, perhaps they were looking at cached data or something, but it's been months and the "About 7,500 results" just won't change even though the actual pages indexed keeps dropping! Does anyone know why Google would be still reporting a high index count, which doesn't actually reflect what is currently indexed? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | CassisGroup0 -
How does Google treat anchor tags on badges after penguin update?
We have a website builder that creates sites in sub-domains (i.e. yoursite.breezi.com) on every site we have included a badge that has anchor text and an image. My question is given the fact that we will include this on many if not most of the sites created inside our builder how will google treat backlinks with the same anchor tag/text from non relevant sites after the penguin update? I am concerned about the backlinks from non-theme related sites and it's SEO implications. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | breezi0