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.
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
-
No Longer Indexed in Google (Says Redirected)
Just recently my page, http:/www./waikoloavacationrentals.com/mauna-lani-terrace, was no longer indexed by google. The sub pages from it still are. I have not done anything sketchy with the page. When I went into the google fetch it says that it is redirected. Any ideas what is this all about? Here is what it says for the fetch: Http/1.1 301 moved permanently
Technical SEO | | RobDalton
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:43:26GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 178
Connection: keep-alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=20
Location: http://waikoloavacationrentals.com/mauna-lani-terrace <title>301 moved permanently</title> <center> 301 moved permanently </center> <center>nginx</center>0 -
Did anyone else noticed Google index bug?
Noticed page indexation drop in Search Console for most of my sites. Guys from Search Engine Land seem to know about that: http://selnd.com/1YqiOoQ Did anyone else noticed something weird?
Technical SEO | | solvid1 -
Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions
Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | ruggero0 -
Getting Google to index a large PDF file
Hello! We have a 100+ MB PDF with multiple pages that we want Google to fully index on our server/website. First of all, is it even possible for Google to index a PDF file of this size? It's been up on our server for a few days, and my colleague did a Googlebot fetch via Webmaster Tools, but it still hasn't happened yet. My theories as to why this may not work: A) We have no actual link(s) to the pdf anywhere on our website. B) This PDF is approx 130 MB and very slow to load. I added some compression to it, but that only got it down to 105 MB. Any tips or suggestions on getting this thing indexed in Google would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BBEXNinja0 -
Why Google ranks a page with Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW?
Hi guys, I was playing with the new OSE when I found out a weird thing: if you Google "performing arts school london" you will see w w w . mountview . org. uk at the 3rd position. The point is that page has "Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", why Google indexed it? Here you can see the robots.txt allows Google to index the URL but not the content, in article they also say the meta robots tag will properly avoid Google from indexing the URL either. Apparently, in my case that page is the only one has the tag "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", but it's the home page. so I said to myself: OK, perhaps they have just changed that tag therefore Google needs time to re-crawl that page and de-index following the no index tag. How long do you think it will take to don't see that page indexed? Do you think it will effect the whole website, as I suppose if you have that tag on your home page (the root domain) you will lose a lot of links' juice - it's totally unnatural a backlinks profile without links to a root domain? Cheers, Pierpaolo
Technical SEO | | madcow780 -
Micro-site homepage not being indexed
http://www.reebok.com/en-US/reebokonehome/ This is a homepage for an instructor network micro-site on Reebok.com The robots.txt file was excluding the /en-US/ directory, we've since removed that exclusion, and resubmitted this URL for indexing via Google Webmaster but we are still not seeing it in the index. Any advice would be very helpful, we may be missing some blocking issue or perhaps we just need to wait longer?
Technical SEO | | PatrickDugan0 -
Lots of Pages Dropped Out of Google's Index?
Until yesterday, my website had about 1200 pages indexed in Google. I did lots of changes: removed low quality content, rewrote passable content to make it better, wrote high quality content, got lots of likes and shares on social networks, etc. Now this morning I see that out of 1252 pages submitted, only 691 are indexed. Is that a temporary situation related to the recent updates? Anyone seeing this? What should I interpret about this?
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
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
Technical SEO | | Sayers0