Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Duplicate content issue: staging urls has been indexed and need to know how to remove it from the serps

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Duplicate content issue: staging urls has been indexed and need to know how to remove it from the serps

    Technical SEO
    5
    6
    1695
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Taiger
      Taiger Subscriber last edited by

      duplicate content issue: staging url has been indexed by google ( many pages) and need to know how to remove them from the serps.

      Bing sees the staging url as moved permanently

      Google sees the staging urls (240 results) and redirects to the correct url Should I be concerned about duplicate content and request Google to remove the staging url removed

      Thanks Guys

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • evolvingSEO
        evolvingSEO @Malika1 last edited by

        Thanks for helping Malika! To clarify for other readers, blocking in robots.txt after the pages have been indexed will actually prevent them from being removed from the index with a meta noindex tag, since Google won't be able to crawl the pages to see the noindex tag.

        If staging URLs have been indexed already (and assuming they still need to exist), here's the steps I would take:

        1. Add meta noindex tags to every staging URLs
        2. If urgent, also do a URL removal request in Webmaster Tools (but this is usually not needed)
        3. Wait until the staging URLs are noindexed - you can check periodically by doing site: searches in Google.
        4. Only after they are noindexed, block Search Engines from crawling them with the robots.txt file.
        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • ChrisAshton
          ChrisAshton @Taiger last edited by

          Generally you'll want to hide your staging site from search engines and as Malika mentioned, the best way to do this is via robots.txt.

          That lets you essentially set a rule stating that no crawlers are to access anything on that domain. Beyond that, nothing else is really relevant; if crawlers can't see your site, it doesn't matter what you do with it! You don't even need to worry about 301 redirects once this is done.

          Once you apply that change in robots.txt, you may still see your staging site indexed for a little while (anywhere from hours to a couple of months) but this is normal and it will drop away soon enough.

          Search engines are pretty good at determining which is the real site these days anyway!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Taiger
            Taiger Subscriber last edited by

            Thanks for your suggestions Peter and Malika,

            By the wayt The staging site had it's own url..

            I think I need help with the canonical stuff, as I am not really sure how to use it.

            ChrisAshton 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Mobilio
              Mobilio last edited by

              Quick way to remove staging url is sending HTTP error 410 as result.
              Other is to use in SearchConsole Remove URLs function https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal

              About duplicate content - you must see actual canonical. If on stage URL there is canonical point to normal site then you shouldn't hesitating. But if staging and normal point to different URLs then you can see some algo filter.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Malika1
                Malika1 last edited by

                I am assuming that these pages don't hold any authority or backlinks at all. You can simply delete these pages (if the purposes of these pages has been solved.

                Or if you still need these pages live, use Robots.txt file to make these pages (or the whole subdomain/directory they are sitting as disallowed, no-index)

                evolvingSEO 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • iHasco

                  URLs dropping from index (Crawled, currently not indexed)

                  I've noticed that some of our URLs have recently dropped completely out of Google's index. When carrying out a URL inspection in GSC, it comes up with 'Crawled, currently not indexed'. Strangely, I've also noticed that under referring page it says 'None detected', which is definitely not the case. I wonder if it could be something to do with the following? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ranking-index-drop-30192.html - It seems to be a bug affecting quite a few people. Here are a few examples of the URLs that have gone missing: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/sexual-harassment-awareness-training https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/conflict-resolution-training https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/prevent-duty-training Any help here would be massively appreciated!

                  Technical SEO | | iHasco
                  0
                • Chris_Wright

                  Removing a site from Google index with no index met tags

                  Hi there! I wanted to remove a duplicated site from the google index. I've read that you can do this by removing the URL from Google Search console and, although I can't find it in Google Search console, Google keeps on showing the site on SERPs. So I wanted to add a "no index" meta tag to the code of the site however I've only found out how to do this for individual pages, can you do the same for a entire site? How can I do it? Thank you for your help in advance! L

                  Technical SEO | | Chris_Wright
                  1
                • Algorhythm_jT

                  Duplicate content issues... en-gb V en-us

                  Hi everyone, I have a global client with lots of duplicate page issues, mainly because they have duplicate pages for US, UK and AUS... they do this because they don't offer all services in all markets, and of course, want to show local contact details for each version. What is the best way to handle this for SEO as clearly I want to rank the local pages for each country. Cheers

                  Technical SEO | | Algorhythm_jT
                  0
                • Dan-Lawrence

                  Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)

                  Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan

                  Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
                  0
                • TomLondon

                  Pages removed from Google index?

                  Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks

                  Technical SEO | | TomLondon
                  0
                • Ditigal_Taylor

                  Duplicate Content

                  We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!

                  Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor
                  0
                • JaredMumford

                  Removing URL Parentheses in HTACCESS

                  Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs. Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?

                  Technical SEO | | JaredMumford
                  0
                • zazo

                  How to tell if PDF content is being indexed?

                  I've searched extensively for this, but could not find a definitive answer. We recently updated our website and it contains links to about 30 PDF data sheets. I want to determine if the text from these PDFs is being archived by search engines. When I do this search http://bit.ly/rRYJPe  (google - site:www.gamma-sci.com and filetype:pdf) I can see that the PDF urls are getting indexed, but does that mean that their content is getting indexed? I have read in other posts/places that if you can copy text from a PDF and paste it that means Google can index the content.  When I try this with PDFs from our site I cannot copy text, but I was told that these PDFs were all created from Word docs, so they should be indexable, correct? Since WordPress has you upload PDFs like they are an image could this be causing the problem? Would it make sense to take the time and extract all of the PDF content to html? Thanks for any assistance, this has been driving me crazy.

                  Technical SEO | | zazo
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.