Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?

[Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie]

Hi Mozzers,

I'd like your feedback on the following:

the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice.

The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's.

What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me.

Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko

[Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie]

Thanks for your input Hutch. Both incidents you described have occured already. I'm on top of it but my developer seems lost.

[Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie]

Thank you Don, looks promising. I'll dive right into it.

[Hutch42]

Once you remove it in GWT make sure to update both your robots.txt to not index along with adding the no index tag to all pages on your test site.  Be careful that you don't accidentally push either the robots or noindex tag onto your live site.

The reason that you want to do both is, while the robots is the best option, if somehow a page on your test site gets linked it can show up in Google for a few days until Google re-crawls your whole site and sees that the robots says not to index anything.  You can tell if this problem is happening in your analytics if you see traffic to test pages spike up for a few days every couple of months.

[donford]

Cyrus Shepard covers removal of a site from Google in a blog post

http://moz.com/blog/we-deindexed-followerwonk

Hopefully this answers your question.

Don