Development/Test Ecommerce Website Mistakenly Indexed
-
My question is - relatively speaking, how damaging to SEO is it to have BOTH your development/testing site and your live version indexed/crawled by Google and appearing in the SERPs?
We just launched about a month ago, and made a change to the robots text on the development site without noticing ... which lead to it being indexed too.So now the ecommerce website is duplicated in Google ... each under different URLs of course (and on diff servers, DNS etc)
We'll fix it right away ... and block crawlers to the development site. But again, may general question is what is the general damage to SEO ... if any ... created by this kind of mistake. My feeling is nothing significant
-
No my friend, no! I'm saying we'll point the existing staging/testing environment to the production version and will stop using it as staging instead of closing it completely like I mentioned earlier. And, we'll launch a fresh instance for staging/testing use case.
This will help us transferring majority if the link juice of already indexed staging/testing instance.
-
Why would you want to 301 a staging/dev environment to a production site? Unless you plan on making live changes to the production server (not safe), you'd want to keep them separate. Especially for eCommerce it would be important to have different environments to test and QA before pushing a change live. Making any change that impacts a number of pages could damage your ability to generate revenue from the site. You don't take down the development/testing site, because that's your safe environment to test changes before pushing updates to production.
I'm not sure I follow your recommendation. Am I missing a critical point?
-
Hi Eric,
Well, that's a valid point that bots might have considered your staging instances as the main website and hence, this could end up giving you nothing but a face palm.
The solution you suggested is similar to the one I suggested where we are not getting any benefit from the existing instance by removing it or putting noindex everywhere.
My bad! I assumed your staging/testing instance(s) got indexed recently only and are not very powerful from domain & page authority perspective. In fact, being a developer, I should have considered the worst case only
Thanks for pointing out the worst case Eric i.e when your staging/testing instances are decently old and you don't want to loose their SEO values while fixing this issue. And, here'e my proposed solution for it: don't removed the instance, don't even put a noindex everywhere. The better solution would be establishing a 301 redirect bridge from your staging/testing instance to your original website. In this case, ~90% of the link juice that your staging/testing instances have earned, will get passed. Make sure each and every URL of the staging/testing instance is properly 301 redirecting to the original instance.
Hope this helps!
-
It could hurt you in the long run (Google may decide the dev site is more relevant than your live site), but this is an easy fix. No-index your dev site. Just slap a site-wide noindex meta tag across all the pages, and when you're ready to move that code to the production site you remove that instance of code.
Disallowing from the robots.txt file will help, but that's a soft request. The best way to keep the dev site from being indexed is to use the noindex tag. Since it seems like you want to QA in a live environment that would prevent search engines from indexing the site, and still allow you to test in a production-like scenario.
-
Hey,
I recently faced the same issue when the staging instances got indexed accidentally and we were open for the duplicate content penalty (well, that's not cool). After a decent bit of research, I followed the following steps and got rid of this issue:
- I removed my staging instances i.e staging1.mysite.com, staging2.mysite.com and so on. Removing such instances helps you deindex already indexed pages faster than just blocking the whole website from robots.txt
- Relaunched the staging instances with a slightly different name like new-staging1.mysite.com, new-staging2.mysite.com and disallow bots on these instances from the day zero to avoid this mess again.
This helped me fixing this issue asap. Hope this helps!
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
-
Coupon websites as affiliates
We recently started using shareasale.com for affiliate marketing and have received literally hundreds of applications from coupon websites wanting to become affiliates. Most we have not approved as the quality of the sites is poor. However, a few sites seem more legitimate. Could having these types of sites harm our seo in any way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unikey1 -
Removing index.php
I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea. I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page. I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all. Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL? I've read that it is a bad practice. I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php. However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL. Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links? I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales. I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file. But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting. Any help or advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MedGroupMedia0 -
Domaim.com/jobs?location=10 is indexed, so is domain.com/jobs/sheffield
Whats the best way you'd tackle that problem? I'm inheriting a website and the old devs had multiple internal links pointing to domain.com/jobs?location=10 (plus a ton of other numbers assigned to locations) and so they've been indexed. I usually use WMTs parameter tool but I'm not sure what the best approach would be other than that. Any help would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
How do I handle this 301/indexing mess?
I'm working on a client's site and noticed a brisk drop in rankings. In doing some digging I found that the homepage (domain.com) is 301'd to domain.com/home.html. Here's my problem/questions: 1. domain.com is indexed by Google 2. domain.com/home.html is not indexed by Google 3. both domains have some healthy linking 4. Is the fact that domain.com/home.html impacting rankings? 5. How do carefully handle this situation (ex. redirect domain.com/home.html back to domain.com?) 6. See the attached jpeg for a visual representation of my debacle. hcIiPAs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
Is 301 redirecting your index page to the root '/' safe to do or do you end up in an endless loop?
Hi I need to tidy up my home page a little, I have some links to our index.html page but I just want them to go to the root '/' so I thought I could 301 redirect it. However is this safe to do? I'm getting duplicate page notifications in my analytic reportings tools about the home page and need a quick way to fix this issue. Many thanks in advance David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
If other websites implement our RSS feed sidewide on there website, can that hurt our own website?
Think about the switching anchors from the backlinks and the 100s of sidewide inlinks... I gues Google will understand that it's just a RSS feed right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Could a HTML <select>with large numbers of <option value="<url>">'s affect my organic rankings</option></select>
Hi there, I'm currently redesigning my website, and one particular pages lists hotels in New York. Some functionality I'm thinking of adding in is to let the user find hotels close to specific concert venues in New York. My current thinking is to provide the following select element on the page - selecting any one of the options will automatically redirect to my page for that concert venue. The purpose of this isn't to affect the organic traffic - I'm simply introducing this as a tool to help customers find the right hotel, but I certainly don't want it to have an adverse effect on my organic traffic. I'd love to know your thoughts on this. I must add that in certain cities, such as New York, there could be up to 450 different options in this select element. | <select onchange="location=options[selectedIndex].value;"> <option value="">Show convenient hotels for:</option> <option value="http://url1..">1492 New York</option> <option value="http://url2..">Abrons Arts Center</option> <option value="http://url3..">Ace of Clubs New York</option> <option value="http://url4..">Affairs Afloat</option> <option value="http://url5..">Affirmation Arts New York</option> <option value="http://url6..">Al Hirschfeld Theatre</option> <option value="http://url7..">Alice Tully Hall</option> .. .. ..</select> Many thanks Mike |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
Website rebranding, what should I worry about?
Hey guys, A client of mine will be doing a rebranding exercise, this include changing their brand name and their domain name. They are considered a well known brand within their industry (Their brand name shows up in Google's "Search Related to..." section) My question is: Apart from making sure all 301 are put in place,changing all the links to point to the new domain and doing PR exercise, is there anything else I should keep in mind / be aware of to ensure a smooth transition? Also can anyone come up with possible issues we might encounter during the move? Apart from having a significant drop in traffic and rankings? Thanks, Clement
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NextDigital510