Redirected Subdomain Development URLs Showing In SERPs?
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I develop client websites within a subdomain of another website (with noindex, nofollow so that incomplete websites on the wrong domains aren't ever seen by web users). Then, when we launch a client's site on their own domain, we redirect all of the development URLS to the appropriate page on the new live site. (meaning at site launch, all pages on http://client-site.developersite.com would be set to 301 redirect to identical pages pages on http://www.client-site.com).
This system has always seemed to work fine, but today I discovered 94,700 pages indexed by Google on my root domain and found that these were mostly old URLs of sites in development that redirect to the actual client sites. Many are several years old. Any idea why Google would be indexing these pages?
Thanks in advance!
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Agreeing with Brent on password-protection. And everything else he said.
Also, if these are CMS-driven sites, I can almost guarantee you you've got paths pointing back to the dev-version. Probably absolute links to images and such. I've had that happen before. Remove the database and files from your dev directories and see what breaks on the live-site
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I guess my question is why would you have to 301 redirect from your development (staging) site to the client's live site if you had nofollow, noindex? Google should not know about the dev site, or even be able to access it.
Sounds like in the new client site there are links going back to the development site. (maybe rel=canonical). Or there is a link out there linking to content you don't want found.
Google's not going to index it unless it finds it. Just jump into Google Webmaster and remove those directories.
Remember, noindex,nofollow or robots.txt are not 100% answers. You should make these sites password protected.
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