Duplicate content issue: staging urls has been indexed and need to know how to remove it from the serps
-
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
-
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:
- Add meta noindex tags to every staging URLs
- If urgent, also do a URL removal request in Webmaster Tools (but this is usually not needed)
- Wait until the staging URLs are noindexed - you can check periodically by doing site: searches in Google.
- Only after they are noindexed, block Search Engines from crawling them with the robots.txt file.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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-removalAbout 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.
-
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)
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
-
Affiliate Url & duplicate content
Hi i have checked passed Q&As and couldn't find anything on this so thought I would ask.
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram
I have recently noticed my URLS adding the following to the end: mydomain.com/?fullweb=1 I cant seem to locate where these URLS are coming from and how this is being created? This is causing duplicate content on google. I wanted to know ig anyone has had any previous experience with something like this? If anyone has any information on this it would be a great help. thanks E0 -
Content Duplication - Zencart
Hi Guys !!! Based on crawler results, it shows that I have 188 duplicate content pages, out of which some are those in which I am not able to understand where the duplication is ??? The page created is unique. All the URL's are static, all titles, metat tags are unique. How do I remove this duplication !!! I am using Zencart as a platform. Thanks in advance for the help !!! 🙂
Technical SEO | | sidjain4you0 -
Duplicate page issue in website
i found duplicate pages in my website. seomoz is showing duplicate web pages this is issue or not please tell me?
Technical SEO | | learningall0 -
Is Noindex Enough To Solve My Duplicate Content Issue?
Hello SEO Gurus! I have a client who runs 7 web properties. 6 of them are satellite websites, and 7th is his company's main website. For a long while, my company has, among other things, blogged on a hosted blog at www.hismainwebsite.com/blog, and when we were optimizing for one of the other satellite websites, we would simply link to it in the article. Now, however, the client has gone ahead and set up separate blogs on every one of the satellite websites as well, and he has a nifty plug-in set up on the main website's blog that pipes in articles that we write to their corresponding satellite blog as well. My concern is duplicate content. In a sense, this is like autoblogging -- the only thing that doesn't make it heinous is that the client is autoblogging himself. He thinks that it will be a great feature for giving users to his satellite websites some great fresh content to read -- which I agree, as I think the combination of publishing and e-commerce is a thing of the future -- but I really want to avoid the duplicate content issue and a possible SEO/SERP hit. I am thinking that a noindexing of each of the satellite websites' blog pages might suffice. But I'd like to hear from all of you if you think that even this may not be a foolproof solution. Thanks in advance! Kind Regards, Mike
Technical SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
De-indexing thin content & Panda--any advantage to immediate de-indexing?
We added the nonidex, follow tag to our site about a week ago on several hundred URLs, and they are still in Google's index. I know de-indexing takes time, but I am wondering if having those URLs in the index will continue to "pandalize" the site. Would it be better to use the URL removal request? Or, should we just wait for the noindex tags to remove the URLs from the index?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Duplicate content and tags
Hi, I have a blog on posterous that I'm trying to rank. SEOMoz tells me that I have duplicate content pretty much everywhere (4 articles written, 6 errors at the last crawl). The problem is that I tag my posts, and apparently SEOMoz thinks that it's duplicate content only because I don't have so many posts, so pages end up being very very similar. What can I do in these situations ?
Technical SEO | | ngw0 -
Duplicate content?
I have a question regarding a warning that I got on one of my websites, it says Duplicate content. I'm canonical url:s and is also using blocking Google out from pages that you are warning me about. The pages are not indexed by Google, why do I get the warnings? Thanks for great seotools! 3M5AY.png
Technical SEO | | bnbjbbkb0 -
Duplicate content question with PDF
Hi, I manage a property listing website which was recently revamped, but which has some on-site optimization weaknesses and issues. For each property listing like http://www.selectcaribbean.com/property/147.html there is an equivalent PDF version spidered by google. The page looks like this http://www.selectcaribbean.com/pdf1.php?pid=147 my question is: Can this create a duplicate content penalty? If yes, should I ban these pages from being spidered by google in the robots.txt or should I make these link nofollow?
Technical SEO | | multilang0