Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
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We are currently coming towards the end of migrating one of our retail sites over to magento. To our horror, we find out today that some pages are already being indexed by Google, and we have started receiving orders through new site. Do you have any suggestions for what may have caused this? Or similarly, what the best solution would be to de-index ourselves? We most recently excluded anything with a certain parameter from robots.txt - could this being implemented incorrectly have caused this issue?
Thanks
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Google has ignored a robots.txt for my site because it thought we were "hiding" important content.
Depending on your site structure, putting a "no index" tag on your page is also a good idea. Doing that as pages are built can prevent it (better) from being indexed in the first place. Then you remove the tag when you are ready to go live. And, submit your updated sitemap via GWT when you finish your move so Google will know what pages to index.
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I would be very careful on how you manage this right now. It all depends on the old and new urls. If this is something in Dev staging, like http://dev.examplesite.com, then it is alright to do everything possible to clean them up. But if the new urls are going to be the new final urls, then you have to be careful.
The best thing you could do right now would be to password protect the new site. That way there isn't a chance of anything getting to it.
All it takes is Google finding one link to the site then it will crawl from there.
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Exclude the whole new site using robots.txt, and remove the current new site-indexed URL's within Webmaster Tools: Optimization > Remove URL's.
When the new site is ready to launch, undo these removed URL's using the "Reinclude" button, also found within the Remove URL's section of Webmaster Tools. Do this prior to 301'ing the old site pages to the new, and you will probably wish to announce the new site launch via social media as well to encourage indexation. +1'ing a page is considered the fastest way to get it indexed.
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