Duplicate content from development website
-
Hi all - I've been trawling for duplicate content and then I stumbled across a development URL, set up by a previous web developer, which nearly mirrors current site (few content and structure changes since then, but otherwise it's all virtually the same). The developer didn't take it down when the site was launched.
I'm guessing the best thing to do is tell him to take down the development URL (which is specific to the pizza joint btw, immediately. Is there anything else I should ask him to do?
Thanks, Luke
-
Well when I did it I put one removal request in for the whole domain and also put a disallow in the robots.txt for the whole site. Matt appears to be referring to putting in to many removal requests, but if you want your whole site removing you only need one so this wouldn't be an issue - you put your domain URL in. When you say your page has no snippet have you checked what your meta description is as this can help influence your snippet text. I would work at getting your development site removed a.s.a.p and then seeing what happens with your snippet - I think that there is a good chance it could be down to duplicate content issues. Have you checked what the cache for your homepage is in Googles results?
-
Hello Max!
Thank you very much for your answer!
First of all... no, i didn't have analytics or webmaster tools on the development site, i just set up google webmaster tools yesterday to put the removal request. There are ~1800 pages from the dev site indexed and i was removing them one by one when i found this artlicle bu Matt Cutts so i stopped removing:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/overdoing-url-removals/
Do you think it would be a good idea to keep doing it?
As far as i have seen, the development site is not outranking the main site but my concern is that the main site home page is showing up in SERP with no snippet so i'm wondering if it´s related somehow with the duplicated content issue.
Regarding your suggestion, DEFINITELLY... that's the type of things that you assume the development company would take care of... I already asked them to add HTTP authentication to the development site!
I really hope Google gets the change soon!
Thank you very much for your help, i really appreciate it!
Un abrazo
-
Hi Max
A couple of questions to understand your situation better - do you have both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools installed on your development site? Is your development site out ranking your main site for any of your key terms?
In my experience unless your development site is out ranking your main site I would add a robots.txt file to disallow all bot access and then I would also put in a removal request for your domain on Google Webmaster Tools. I found this fix very quick - within a matter of days everything was fixed.
However if you feel that you are getting traffic to your development site and it is out ranking your main site, so you have decided that the rel canonical option is best I would still remove your development site when rankings swap around (as Marie pointed out this took a week or so for her).
In regards to your development site I would always aim to have it removed from the index and when you have your issues sorted I would place a password on the whole site so that nobody can access it other than you or someone that has the password. This will allow you to use your development site to its full potential and not have to worry about competitors that have found the URL monitoring your development site even when it is de-indexed!
BTW when I had this issue I had several thousand pages indexed in Google from my development site. Unfortunately I can't give you an exact time as to how long it will take to fix this issue as it all depends on the current crawl rates to your sites.
Hope this helps!
-
I'm having a very similar problem... the development site got crawled and it has 1700+ pages indexed in Google. I'm working to redirect every page from the development site to its equivalent in the production site.
There's something else that i don't understand... the home page of the production site is not showing any snippet in SERPs.. do you think this can be caused by the duplication issue with the development site?
After redirecting from development to production, how long do you think it will take google to reindex everything and understand that there's no duplicated content anymore?
I would really appreciate your opinions!
Un abrazo
-
Thanks so much Matt, Kerie & Marie - brilliant advice there - really brilliant. With your help it's all removed now.
Blimey, that discovery sure set my heart racing (eeeek.)
-
Thanks Keri, great advice on the use of a code monitor - I have known the situation to occur where code changes have been made to development sites and the robots.txt has been changed or removed by mistake causing the development site to be indexed again. Monitoring this would have helped react to this situation so much quicker!
-
I had a similar situation where I had developed a site for a landscaping client. I thought I had gotten rid of the files but somehow Google found them. My development site ranked #1 for his terms and his site was on something like page 6 because it was duplicate content. Here's what I did:
I didn't want to take down my site right away because his company was ranking #1 for his keywords. (Even though they landed on the development site they still had his phone number to call.)
I added a rel canonical to the development site that told Google that the correct site to index was actually the client's site.
Within a week or so, the proper site was ranking #1. At that point I deleted the files for the development site.
-
Excellent advice here. If it's on a subdomain, the subdomain can be claimed in GWT as its own site. You can put a robots.txt on the subdomain then request the entire subdomain be removed from the index.
You may want to go one step further and use something like PolePosition's Code Monitor that checks the code of any page once per day and alerts you if there's a change. In a similar situation, I had it monitor the robots.txt for the live and all development sites for where I was working, so I knew if the developers changed something and could react quickly.
-
Hi Luke
I had the same problem and this is how I fixed it - I registered the development domain with GWT and then put in a removal request. I also got our developers to setup a robot.txt file to tell search engines not to index any of the site - the contents of the robots.txt file are as follows:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
This soon fixed the issue for us. Hope this helps - obviously you don't need the robots.txt if your are just going to take the site down completely as there will be no worry of people finding it in search engines and mistaking it for your live site or search engines finding duplicate content. I used this strategy as we still use the development site for testing etc before going live.
Can I just check is the URL on a separate domain? If it isn't and it is part of your existing domain for instance you can still block that URL using either a robots.txt file or a no index, no follow meta tag. You can also request removal of specific URL's within a site in GWT.
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
-
Content very similar on different websites
Hello, I am in the travel industry and I am currently building the same website (different domain names), one for the US and one for the UK (same website design). They will both features the same content (itinerary, activities) on the page with 2 exception, the 1 st one is that I will use different hotels for my uk clientele and for my US clientele and on the UK page I will use the word "holiday" in the UK and the word "vacation" in the US. Can the fact that I do the same "itineraries" and use the same text on 95 % of the page hurt my ranking in one country or another ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Can pop-ups cause duplicate content issues in product pages?
Normally for ecommerce clients that have 100's of products we advise for size guides, installation guides etc to be placed as downloadable PDF resources to avoid huge blocks of content on multiple product pages. If content was placed in a popup e.g. fancybox, across multiple product pages would this be read by Google as duplicate content? Examples for this could be: An affiliate site with mutiple prices for a product and pop-up store reviews A clothing site with care and size guides What would be the best practice or setup?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
Best practice with duplicate content. Cd
Our website has recently been updated, now it seems that all of our products pages look like this cdnorigin.companyname.com/catagory/product Google is showing these pages within the search. rather then companyname.com/catagory/product Each product page does have a canaonacal tag on that points to the cdnorigin page. Is this best practice? i dont think that cdnorigin.companyname etc looks very goon in the search. is there any reason why my designer would set the canonical tags up this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Is Sitemap Issue Causing Duplicate Content & Unindexed Pages on Google?
On July 10th my site was migrated from Drupal to Google. The site contains approximately 400 pages. 301 permanent redirects were used. The site contains maybe 50 pages of new content. Many of the new pages have not been indexed and many pages show as duplicate content. Is it possible that there is a site map issue that is causing this problem? My developer believes the map is formatted correctly, but I am not convinced. The sitemap address is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/page-sitemap.xml [^] I am completely non technical so if anyone could take a brief look I would appreciate it immensely. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan | |0 -
Duplicate content for swatches
My site is showing a lot of duplicate content on SEOmoz. I have discovered it is because the site has a lot of swatches (colors for laminate) within iframes. Those iframes have all the same content except for the actual swatch image and the title of the swatch. For example, these are two of the links that are showing up with duplicate content: http://www.formica.com/en/home/dna.aspx?color=3691&std=1&prl=PRL_LAMINATE&mc=0&sp=0&ots=&fns=&grs= http://www.formica.com/en/home/dna.aspx?color=204&std=1&prl=PRL_LAMINATE&mc=0&sp=0&ots=&fns=&grs= I do want each individual swatch to show up in search results and they currently are if you search for the exact swatch name. Is the fact that they all have duplicate content affecting my individual rankings and my domain authority? What can I do about it? I can't really afford to put unique content on each swatch page so is there another way to get around it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Guest blogging and duplicate content
I have a guest blog prepared and several sites I can submit it to, would it be considered duplicate content if I submitted one guest blog post to multipul blogs? and if so this content is not on my site but is linking to it. What will google do? Lets say 5 blogs except the same content and post it up, I understand that the first blog to have it up will not be punished, what about the rest of the blogs? can they get punished for this duplicate content? can I get punished for having duplicate content linking to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Multi-language, multi-country localized website with duplicate content penalty
My company website is multi-language and multi-country. Content created for the Global (English-language only, root directory) site is automatically used when no localization exists for the language and country choice (i.e. Brazil). I'm concerned this may be harming our SEO through dupe content penalties. Can anyone confirm this is possible? Any recommendations on how to solve the issue? Maybe the canonical tag? Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTreviranus0