Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    8
    7922
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • iam-sold
      iam-sold last edited by

      I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains!

      • company.com
      • agency1.company.com
      • agency2.company.com...

      I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google:

      • demo.company.com
      • demo.agency1.company.com
      • demo.agency2.company.com...

      Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index?

      We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it?

      I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all.

      The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually.

      Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • EugeneSong
        EugeneSong last edited by

        Why couldn't I just put a password on the staging site, and let Google sort out the rest? Just playing devil's advocate.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • hammadrafique
          hammadrafique @iam-sold last edited by

          If you've enough time to verify each subdomain in WMT and also removing 400+ domains one by one, then you can go for solution 2. You can't remove subdomain from verified WMT account of main domain, that's why you need to verify each domain.

          Adding canonical is a better option, it wouldn't remove all of the demo domains from Google's index rapidly, you have to wait for few months, but you'll be on the safe side.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • iam-sold
            iam-sold @hammadrafique last edited by

            Out of curiosity, why wouldn't you recommend solution 2?

            You mentioned that you faced a similar kind of situation in the past, how did that work out? Which of the 3 solutions (or all) did you opt for?

            hammadrafique 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • iam-sold
              iam-sold @customerparadigm.com last edited by

              Good advice but an IP restriction for the demo sites won't be possible on this occasion as our router throws out a range of different IP addresses and we occasionally need the sites to be viewed externally! Any other suggestions to help?

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • customerparadigm.com
                customerparadigm.com last edited by

                I'd also recommend putting in an IP restriction for any of the demo sites.

                So that if anyone visits the demo sites from a non-whitelisted IP address, then you can display an error message, or simply redirect them over to the live site.

                That will likely have the search results quickly removed from the search engine.

                Hope this helps!

                -- Jeff

                iam-sold 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • hammadrafique
                  hammadrafique last edited by

                  Solution 1:

                  Add robots.txt on all demo domains and block them, or add noindex in their header.

                  Solution 2: Verify each domain in webmaster tools and remove it entirely from the link removal section ( I wouldn't recommend this).

                  Solution 3:

                  If your both domains like agency1.domain.com and demo.agency1.domain.com have same coding and are clone then you should just add canonical url to the agency1.domain.com and canonical will be http://agency.domain.com/ it will work if it will be automatically shown in the demo domain. if it doesn't show up in the demo domain automatically then add the same canonical to the demo domain.

                  It will take some time to deindexed from serps, but it will surely work. I've faced the same kind of situation in past.

                  iam-sold 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Lumina
                    Lumina last edited by

                    Noindex is your best option, really. It might take weeks, but I don't think any other method is going to be faster. Plus, technically speaking, "noindex" is the proper method for what you want to do - canonical tags or a robots.txt may do the job, but they aren't exactly the right way.

                    Good luck!

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • Jazee

                      Set Placeholder Page ASAP or Wait For Full Website?

                      It can take some time for a new business website to get picked up by all the search engines and indexed. Let's assume it's going to take a month to build your new full-fledged business website.  Would it be advantageous in the mean time to immediately launch the domain with an introductory website using a template site so you might have just two pages, a home page with logo, title, brief description of pages, a couple images, etc and a contact page. Would this help give the site a "jump start" on being indexed? Or could that do more harm than good by putting up something "quick & dirty" versus the complete website with much more content, that has been SEO optimized?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee
                      0
                    • Julien.Ferras

                      Google doesn't index image slideshow

                      Hi, My articles are indexed and images (full size) via a meta in the body also. But, the images in the slideshow are not indexed, have you any idea? A problem with the JS Example : http://www.parismatch.com/People/Television/Sport-a-la-tele-les-femmes-a-l-abordage-962989 Thank you in advance Julien

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Julien.Ferras
                      0
                    • imsi

                      Index process multi language website for different countries

                      We are in charge of a website with 7 languages for 16 countries. There are only slight content differences by countries (google.de | google.co.uk). The website is set-up with the correct language & country annotation e.g. de/DE/ | de/CH/ | en/GB/ | en/IE. All unwanted annotations are blocked by robots.txt. The «hreflang alternate» are also set. The objective is, to make the website visible in local search engines. Therefore we have submitted a overview sitemap connected with a sitemap per country. The sitemap has been submitted now for quite a while, but Google has indexed only 10 % of the content. We are looking for suggestion to boost the index process.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imsi
                      0
                    • netviper

                      What is the best way to get anchor text cloud in line?

                      So I am working on a website, and it has been doing seo with keyword links for a a few years. The first branded terms comes in a 7% in 10th in the list on Ahefs. The keyword terms are upwards of 14%. What is the best way to get this back in line?  It would take several months to build keyword branded terms to make any difference - but it is doable. I could try link removal, but less than 10% seem to actually get removed -- which won't make a difference. The disavow file doesn't really seem to do anything either. What are your suggestions?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper
                      0
                    • RG_SEO

                      Best server-side sitemap generators

                      I've been looking into sitemap generators recently and have got a good knowledge of what creating a sitemap for a small website of below 500 URLs involves. I have successfully generated a sitemap for a very small site, but I’m trying to work out the best way of crawling a large site with millions of URLs. I’ve decided that the best way to crawl such a large number of URLs is to use a server side sitemap, but this is an area that doesn’t seem to be covered in detail on SEO blogs / forums. Could anyone recommend a good server side sitemap generator? What do you think of the automated offerings from Google and Bing? I’ve found a list of server side sitemap generators from Google, but I can’t see any way to choose between them. I realise that a lot will depend on the type of technologies we use server side, but I'm afraid that I don't know them at this time.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO
                      0
                    • steviephil

                      Best way to noindex an image?

                      Hi all, A client wanted a few pages noindexed, which was no problem using the meta robots noindex tag. However they now want associated images removed, some of which still appear on pages that they still want indexed. I added the images to their robots.txt file a few weeks ago (probably over a month ago actually) but they're all still showing when you do an image search. What's the best way to noindex them for good, and how do I go about implementing it? Many thanks, Steve

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steviephil
                      0
                    • desmond.liang

                      Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?

                      Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: -  No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang
                      1
                    • mweidner2782

                      Best way to get pages indexed fast?

                      Any suggestion on best ways to get new sites pages indexed? Was thinking getting high pr inbound links on fiverr but always a little risky right? Thanks for your opinions.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mweidner2782
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    • Digital Marketers
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.