Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
-
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
-
It definitely will.
-
Really my main concern is the duplicate content issue. I think the 301 should solve it
-
Yes the 301 will solve it but not necessarily any quicker than the robots.txt update. It will still be indexed until Google crawls it again, which doesn't really matter too terribly (especially if you're redirecting)
Chances are your site won't populate for any high-volume keywords since it's new... And it would be de-indexed eventually if you blocked it from the robots. In any case, all of these options will work and you should be fine.
Good luck!
-
Unfortunately we took the site live before we realized that Google had somehow indexed the pages. So I think adding the 301 redirects should solve the problem. In the future I will add the noindex, no follow tag to each dev page. I will also password protect the dev. site.
-
That would be a good way to do it. The other way would be to block it in the robots.txt file on the root directory. Although be careful you aren't blocking both since it's a subdomain.
You could also add a noindex, nofollow tag to each dev page but then you have to remember to remove those when you push them live to your real domain.
I'd probably go with the Robots.txt option since using the redirect will not allow you to view the site live which I'm assuming would take away from the whole point of having this "staging" sub-domain.
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
-
Creating a help hub, not sure the best name to use, " keyword help " or " help hub "?
I've been creating new content for our site, lots of help related content, so I created a help hub section. Now the more I go through it, and look at url structure and breadcrumbs, I can't help but think I should be using a keyword in there, but also don't want to over do it, since the keyword we are shooting for is also a subsection of our site, complete with url keyword and breadcrumb. So I just don't want to have too many over redundant titles like keyword this and keyword that, so I came here to get some advice from the awesome community of folks. Keep help hub so it's: Url: site.com/help-hub/helppage1 Breadcrumb: Home > Help-Hub > Help Page 1 or Url: site.com/keyword/help/helppage1 Breadcrumb: Home > Keyword > Help > Help Page 1
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
How do I "undo" or remove a Google Search Console change of address?
I have a client that set a change of address in Google Search Console where they informed Google that their preferred domain was a subdomain, and now they want Google to also consider their base domain (without the change of address). How do I get the change of address in Google search console removed?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng0 -
Many "spin-off" sites - 301 or 401/410?
Hi there, I've just started a new job with a rental car company with locations all over New Zealand and Australia. I've discovered that we have several websites along the lines of "rentalcarsnewzealand", "bigsaverentals" etc that are all essentially clones of our primary site. I'm assuming that these were set up as some sort of "interesting" SEO attempt. I want to get rid of them, as they create customer experience issues and they're not getting a hell of a lot of traffic (or driving bookings) anyway. I was going to just 301 them all to our homepage - is this the right approach? Several of the sites are indexed by Google and they've been linked up to a number of sites - the 301 move wouldn't be to try to derive any linkjuice or anything of that nature, but simply to get people to our main site if they do find themselves clicking a link to one of those sites. Thanks very much for your advice! Nicole
Technical SEO | | AceRentalCars0 -
How do I influence what page on my site google shows for specific search phrases?
Hi People, My client has a site www.activeadventures.com. They provide adventure tours of New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. These destinations are split into 3 folders in the site (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand, activeadventures.com/south-america etc....). The actual root folder of the site is generic information for all of the destinations whilst the destination specific folders are specific in their information for the destination in question. The Problem: If you search for say "Active New Zealand" or "Adventure Tours South America" our result that comes up is the activeadventures.com homepage rather than the destination folder homepage (eg: We would want activeadventures.com/new-zealand to be the landing page for people searching for "active new zealand"). Are there any ways in influence google as to what page on our site it chooses to serve up? Many thanks in advance. Conrad
Technical SEO | | activenz0 -
How to fix google index filled with redundant parameters
Hi All This follows on from a previous question (http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-fix-google-index-after-fixing-site-infected-with-malware) that on further investigation has become a much broader problem. I think this is an issue that may plague many sites following upgrades from CMS systems. First a little history. A new customer wanted to improve their site ranking and SEO. We discovered the site was running an old version of Joomla and had been hacked. URL's such as http://domain.com/index.php?vc=427&Buy_Pinnacle_Studio_14_Ultimate redirected users to other sites and the site was ranking for buy adobe or buy microsoft. There was no notification in webmaster tools that the site had been hacked. So an upgrade to a later version of Joomla was required and we implemented SEF URLs at the same time. This fixed the hacking problem, we now had SEF url's, fixed a lot of duplicate content and added new titles and descriptions. Problem is that after a couple of months things aren't really improving. The site is still ranking for adobe and microsoft and a lot of other rubbish and the urls like http://domain.com/index.php?vc=427&Buy_Pinnacle_Studio_14_Ultimate are still sending visitors but to the home page as are a lot of the old redundant urls with parameters in them. I think it is default behavior for a lot of CMS systems to ignore parameters it doesn't recognise so http://domain.com/index.php?vc=427&Buy_Pinnacle_Studio_14_Ultimate displays the home page and gives a 200 response code. My theory is that Google isn't removing these pages from the index because it's getting a 200 response code from old url's and possibly penalizing the site for duplicate content (which don't showing up in moz because there aren't any links on the site to these url's) The index in webmaster tools is showing over 1000 url's indexed when there are only around 300 actual url's. It also shows thousands of url's for each parameter type most of which aren't used. So my question is how to fix this, I don't think 404's or similar are the answer because there are so many and trying to find each combination of parameter would be impossible. Webmaster tools advises not to make changes to parameters but even so I don't think resetting or editing them individually is going to remove them and only change how google indexes them (if anyone knows different please let me know) Appreciate any assistance and also any comments or discussion on this matter. Regards, Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Google indexing directory folder listing page
Google somehow managed to find several of our images index folders and decided to include them into their index. Example: websitesite.com/category/images/ is what you'll see when doing a site:website.com search. So, I have two-part question: 1) Does this hurt our site's ability to rank in any way?
Technical SEO | | invision
Because all Google sees is just a directory listing page with a bunch of links to images in the folder. 2) If there could be any negative effect, what is the best way to get these folders out of Google's index?
I could block via robots.txt, but I'm afraid it will also block all the images in that folder from being indexed in Google image search. I could also turn off directory listing in cpanel / htaccess, but then that gives is a 403 forbidden. Will this hurt the site in anyway and would it prevent Google from indexing the images in the directory? Thanks,
Tony0 -
Why google index my IP URL
hi guys, a question please. if site:112.65.247.14 , you can see google index our website IP address, this could duplicate with our darwinmarketing.com content pages. i am not quite sure why google index my IP pages while index domain pages, i understand this could because of backlink, internal link and etc, but i don't see obvious issues there, also i have submit request to google team to remove ip address index, but seems no luck. Please do you have any other suggestion on this? i was trying to do change of address setting in Google Webmaster Tools, but didn't allow as it said "Restricted to root level domains only", any ideas? Thank you! boson
Technical SEO | | DarwinChinaSEO0 -
Should I use a "-", ":", or "|" in the title tag?
Out of habit, I've always put a "-" or dash to separate items in the title tag. However, I've noticed that more and more sites are using either a ":" or "|" in the title. Is there one that is better to use than the other?
Technical SEO | | beeneeb0