Development site crawled
-
We just found out our password protected development site has been crawled. We are worried about duplicate content - what are the best steps to take to correct this beyond adding to robots.txt?
-
Unfortunately, robots.txt won't prevent your site from being crawled and indexed if there is a link from an external site pointing to yours. What you need to do is use
on all your development pages. I don't know how big your site is, so this may or may not be a lot of work. Do this, then after the next Google crawl, your pages will be dropped from the SERPs.
-
Thanks Stephen & Kyle! We had the site behind a login, so we're not sure how this happened. Any idea?
-
Put the site behind a login
-
Oops! That sounds unfortunate, Marcy. How did that happen?
Once you have added the correct rules to the robots.txt - I'm guessing you're using "Disallow: /" - you can request, if your development site is registered in Google Webmaster Tools, that Google remove the site from its index.
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal
Hope that helps,
K
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
-
Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results on 100% responsive site
Has anyone experienced an issue where Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results than their Desktop site crawl on a 100% responsive website that passes all Google Mobile tests?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Crawling issue
Hello, I am working on 3 weeks old new Magento website. On GWT, under index status >advanced, I can only see 1 crawl on the 4th day of launching and I don't see any numbers for indexed or blocked status. | Total indexed | Ever crawled | Blocked by robots | Removed |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sedamiran
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | I can see the traffic on Google Analytic and i can see the website on SERPS when i search for some of the keywords, i can see the links appear on Google but i don't see any numbers on GWT.. As far as I check there is no 'no index' or robot block issue but Google doesn't crawl the website for some reason. Any ideas why i cannot see any numbers for indexed or crawled status on GWT? Thanks Seda | | | | |
| | | | |0 -
Micro Site Penalty?
I have been carrying out On-Page optimisation only for a client www.shade7.co.nz. After three months or so I have been getting some great results, improving to the top three positions for at least 30 of 45 keywords targeted. Couple of more tweaks and I would be a very happy camper. Disaster overnight! Rankings CRASH! Unbeknown to me the client a month or so back decided to link just about every product/link on a micro site he owns (www.shademakers.com/ ) plus one other site he owns. Explorer I think discovered over 350 back-links (follow) from these sites! As this is a site he owns and it is targeting the same keywords I presume this falls into the EVIL bucket of SEO. Two part question do you believe I am correct that this is the reason for this rankings crash and what would be the best way to resolve this! server-side 301 redirect for the micro site? Delete the micro site (drastic measure) Remove all the links other than maybe one in the contact page saying visit our other site shade7 other options? The client or I have not received any bad link Emails from Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Moving-Web-SEO-Auckland0 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Is this site legit?
http://www.gglpls.com/ is this site legit? Submit website to google + directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Should I link my similar sites together?
Hi I currently have two sites within exactly the same market. I've just purchased a third website from someone. Should I link these sites together? (i.e. in the page header should I cross link them or point two of them to the third?) If I do this will it harm them if they are on the same C-Class IP blocks? Is using private domains and different hosting companies considered dodgey in any way? Basically I'm a big wimp and don't want to do anything potentially that might potentially hurt my rankings;)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish0 -
Merging three sites to one
Hi guys, I just wanted confirmation if this is the right way to go about doing this. I need to merge three websites and I've never done three websites in to a brand new site before. Ok so we have Sitex.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero
Sitey.com
Sitez.com We've created a SiteB.com SiteB.com has SiteB.com/SiteXCat
SiteB.com/SiteYCat
SiteB.com/SiteZCat Each X,Y and Z have over 1,000 pages. They only have about 10 pages each with Page Authority above 10 and the domains arn't that strong. What i plan to do is: 301 redirect each site domain (X,Y,,Z) to it's corresponding category. e.g. Sitex.com > SiteB.com/SiteXCat 301 redirect each page off X,Y,Z that has a Page Authority above 10 to their new pages on SiteB.com Then, I'm unsure if i should 410 every other URL... I don't think its worht 301 every single URL if they arn't in search results much - but maybe it is if they have a lot of inbound links even with low page authority? Any ideas and does the above seem the best practise? Thanks.0