Test contet/pages indexed by search engines
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During the web development stages of our Joomla CMS website, we have managed to get our site indexed for totally irrelevant test pages mainly to do with Joomla and some other equally irrelevant test content. How damaging is this to our domain from an SEO prospective and is there something we can do about it?
When we do a site:domain.com search we see hundreds of testpages with test/irrelevant meta tags etc.
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Search engines regularly recrawl every website and will update their information based on changes you make to your site. It is a natural part of the internet. The "site under construction" information is not harmful, but in the future should be blocked from indexing.
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Thankfully its only test urls that have been indexed by Google only.
However all 3 major engines have indexed our domain against "Site under construction" page with untitled/incomplete tags.
Is this harmful or will this be overwritten when we launch properly and get our site indexed?
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When you begin developing a site, you should use the robots.txt file to block all search engine access to the site. This is one of the few times where a robots.txt file is very useful.
With respect to fixing the issue, it depends on whether the URLs will be used on the live site, how long it will be until your site launched, and whether unique URLs such as /testing were used or you are working with the same URLs which will exist on the live site.
If your site is still in testing and it will remain in testing for 30+ days, you could add the noindex tag sitewide. Once all the pages were removed from the index, you can then add the robots.txt file. Be careful not to adjust the robots.txt file prior to the pages being removed as the search engines wont be able to see the noindex tag.
You did not mention which search engine indexed your pages. If you are working with Google and the URLs will not exist on the live site, you could use the Google Removal Tool. This is really overkill and should not be necessary, but if the site owner is paranoid about the test pages causing damage to SEO you can take this approach. Any URL removed in this manner cannot be re-added to the index for 90 days.
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