Duplicate Content? Designing new site, but all content got indexed on developer's sandbox
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An ecommerce I'm helping is getting a complete redesign.
Their developer had a sandbox version of their new site for design & testing. Several thousand products were loaded into the sandbox site.
Then Google/Bing crawled and indexed the site (because developer didn't have a robots.txt), picking up and caching about 7,200 pages. There were even 2-3 orders placed on the sandbox site, so people were finding it.
So what happens now?
When the sandbox site is transferred to the final version on the proper domain, is there a duplicate content issue?
How can the developer fix this? -
That would seem to be reasonable, with the information you've given. Best of luck!
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Thank you for the very clear response!
The sandbox is on a subdomain of the developer's website. ourSite.theirDevSite.com/sandbox/
Their robots.txt actually redirects to their main website (why? no idea).
But the developer should verify the subdomain sandbox site in GWT/BWT, then disallow everything with robots.txt (and stop redirecting it), then request the entire site to be removed. Anything I'm missing?
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Is the sandbox on its own subdomain or own domain? If so, verify the site in Google/Bing webmaster tools (subdomains verify as their own site), put in a robots.txt excluding everything, then go and request URL removal of the entire site in the webmaster tools.
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