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
-
Moving my website to Wordpress, what are the possible consequences?
I am moving my website to WordPress after years. I am curious to know what the best route to maintain as much SEO value as possible would be. We have a lot of 301 redirects currently, and we will maintain those, but what else should we do or know? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hwade0 -
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Now that Google will be indexing Twitter, are Twitter backlinks likely to effect website rank in the SERPs?
About a year (or 2) ago, Matt Cutts said that Twitter and FB have no effect on website rank, in part because Google can't get to the content. Now that Google will be indexing Twitter (again), do we expect that links in twitter posts will be useful backlinks for improving SERP rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thriveworks-Counseling1 -
Merging websites
My company (A) is about the merge with another company (B). The long-term plan is not to keep their brand or website. In terms of the merge process, I have been doing a bit of research and this is how I'm thinking about doing it so far., which is open minded about changing... On the homepage of company B, do a 302 redirect to an information page on the same website which details the merger. This will only be for a year. After a year has passed, do a 301 redirect to the homepage of company A Do 301 redirects from all other pages to similar pages on company A. For pages that don't correspond, either do a 302 to the 'merger detail page', or do a 301 to the homepage of company A. Bring across any content that is effective at driving traffic. Contact all high authority websites that have links to company B and request for them to be updated. Any tips/corrections appreciated. Stu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stuart260 -
Rankings and keywords
I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months. The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock! We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes. For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover. It's like Google isn't even reading the home page. The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3. I have told this to the client. Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page. Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank? Any suggestions would help! Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickIt0 -
Can I Improve Organic Ranking by Restrict Website Access to Specific IP Address or Geo Location?
I am targeting my website in US so need to get high organic ranking in US web search. One of my competitor is restricting website access to specific IP address or Geo location. I have checked multiple categories to know more. What's going on with this restriction and why they make it happen? One of SEO forum is also restricting website access to specific location. I can understand that, it may help them to stop thread spamming with unnecessary Sign Up or Q & A. But, why Lamps Plus have set this? Is there any specific reason? Can I improve my organic ranking? Restriction may help me to save and maintain user statistic in terms of bounce rate, average page views per visit, etc...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit1 -
Domains for regional websites
Please take a look at 7city.com This landing page contains links to: www.7city.co.uk www.7city.ae www.7city.com.sg and our US website which is also www.7city.com It is programmed so: If you are a first time user and type www.7city.com you go to the landing page above. If you then click on AMERICAS, it sets a cookie and directs you to http://www.7city.com/home . When you revisit www.7city.com in the future as the cookie is set you will be automatically sent to the AMERICAS website i.e http://www.7city.com/home. Our US websites is nor performing well on organic ranking compared to other regional website. Is the above technique hindering our organic ranking in the US. Also, I have been led to believe that you get a higher ranking if the domain is specific to a country. Is this true? Does 7city.com receive higher ranking than if I created it as 7city.us for example? Many Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830