How did my dev site end up in the search results?
-
We use a subdomain for our dev site. I never thought anything of it because the only way you can reach the dev site is through a vpn. Google has somehow indexed it. Any ideas on how that happened? I am adding the noindex tag, should I used canonical? Or is there anything else you can think of?
-
Personally, I'd still recommend using robots.txt to disallow all crawlers, even if more steps are taken.
-
Don't use tool removal, it can go bad indeed. Now, are you sure that there are no external links coming from anywhere?
For now I'd recommend putting noindex, nofollow on that dev subdomain and do manual recrawl through GWT.
-
It just uses internal links. Do you think I should try the webmaster tools removal? That seems like it could go wrong.
-
I never used screaming frog, does it check both external and internal links?
-
I have ran screaming frog to see if there are any links to any pages and but couldn't see any. Even if Google did try to follow it the firewall would stop them. It is so strange.
-
Then my first assumption is that it's linked from somewhere - read my comment a little above.
-
Then there is a leak somewhere - Google bots can "see" your subdomain.
Or it's been simply linked from somewhere. Then Google will try to follow the link and that would make it indexed.
-
They are telling me that there are no holes, and I have tried getting to the pages but can not do it unless I am on my vpn.
-
We never updated the robots.txt because the site was behind a firewall. If you click on any of the results it will not load the page unless on my VPN.
-
Robots.txt won't help anyhow. Bots still can see that there is such directory, they just won't see what's inside of those directories/subdomains.
-
Hi there.
If what you say is true, then there are only two answers: you got a leak somewhere or your settings/configuration is messed up.I'd say go talk to your system admin and make sure that everything what's supposed to be closed is closed, IPs, which are supposed to be open for use are open and those IPs only.
-
Have you updated the dev sites robots.txt to disallow everything? It is up to the bot to listen, but that combined with removing all of the dev URLs from Google Webmaster tools should do the trick.
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
-
How to Get Rid of Dates Shown In Google Search Results
When I enter "Site: URL" to check what a search how Google displays search result, a date appears at the very front. This takes away several characters, really valuable real estate. How can I stop Google from displaying these dates? There are certain Wordpress plugins like "WP Date Remover" however the seem to only apply to blog posts. Dates are appearing on results on all my Wordpress pages. Is there an internal setting in Wordpress that will allow me to remove dates for these non blogpost pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result
On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase. What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plumvoice0 -
Search terms that have the same meaning
If there are two fairly equally strong search terms that mean the same thing and want to direct people to a single page on my site, is it recommended that both phrases be placed in the H1? For example, Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich (BLT Sandwich) I don't want to rank high for only one phrase while ranking lower (and potentially losing users) for the second phrase. What's the best strategy for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hamackey0 -
Backlinking 3 sites from same domain and backlinking main site too
Hello, we have 4 sites, in which 1 is a main site and rest 3 are niche sites All these 3 sites have dofollow links to main site from home page We got a high quality backlink - through which all 3 niche sites have got it from that domain Is it worth to add backlink from that domain to main site too, despite the fact the 3 sites already have recvd it and they all link to main site many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Duplicate site (disaster recovery) being crawled and creating two indexed search results
I have a primary domain, toptable.co.uk, and a disaster recovery site for this primary domain named uk-www.gtm.opentable.com. In the event of a disaster, toptable.co.uk would get CNAMEd (DNS alias) to the .gtm site. Naturally the .gtm disaster recover domian is an exact match to the toptable.co.uk domain. Unfortunately, Google has crawled the uk-www.gtm.opentable site, and it's showing up in search results. In most cases the gtm urls don't get redirected to toptable they actually appear as an entirely separate domain to the user. The strong feeling is that this duplicate content is hurting toptable.co.uk, especially as .gtm.ot is part of the .opentable.com domain which has significant authority. So we need a way of stopping Google from crawling gtm. There seem to be two potential fixes. Which is best for this case? use the robots.txt to block Google from crawling the .gtm site 2) canonicalize the the gtm urls to toptable.co.uk In general Google seems to recommend a canonical change but in this special case it seems robot.txt change could be best. Thanks in advance to the SEOmoz community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OpenTable0 -
Site Search Tracking Of Non Existing Products
I am working towards optimizing the site search box of an ecommerce website and I wish to track the keywords which users are searching but which are yielding no results. Please see the image for the same. I wish to assimilate data on the same which would then allow me to add products which users are searching but which the site doesn't have. However my problem is that I don't know how you could obtain this data in analytics because these results manifest itself in the form of searchresults.php. I know that analyzing search refinements and percentage of exits in Google Analytics is an option but I want a more compact and simpler solution to the problem where I could see exactly all the data in one place. Does anyone have suggestions on how this can be done? Thanks in advance, Y35Mj.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0