Indexation question
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Hi Guys, i have a small problem with our development website. Our development website is website.dev.website.nl This page shouldn't be indexed bij Google but unfortunately it is.
What can i do to deindex it and ask google not to index this website. In the robots.txt or are there better ways to do this?
Kind regards Ruud
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In addition to Tom's response, you can also use Google Webmaster to remove the site out of the index a little faster:
Follow these steps to remove a site or directory from Google's search results:
- On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
- On the left-hand menu, click Optimization and then click Remove URLs.
- Click New removal request.
- Type the URL of the directory you want removed from search results and then click Continue. (How to find the right URL.)
- The URL is case-sensitive—use exactly the same characters and capitalization that the site uses.
- If you want to remove the whole site, you can leave this blank.
- Click Remove directory.
- Click Submit Request.
Make sure you aren't accidentally linking to the dev site from your live site. I have seen this happen too many times.
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Hi Ruud
As you've said, I'd go ahead and add a robots.txt file. One thing to remember is that each subdomain requires its own robots.txt file.
In addition, I would add "noindex, follow" to the header of the pages you don't want crawl.
You can find out the best way to implement these changes with the Moz Robotstxt guide.
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