Redirected Subdomain Development URLs Showing In SERPs?
-
I develop client websites within a subdomain of another website (with noindex, nofollow so that incomplete websites on the wrong domains aren't ever seen by web users). Then, when we launch a client's site on their own domain, we redirect all of the development URLS to the appropriate page on the new live site. (meaning at site launch, all pages on http://client-site.developersite.com would be set to 301 redirect to identical pages pages on http://www.client-site.com).
This system has always seemed to work fine, but today I discovered 94,700 pages indexed by Google on my root domain and found that these were mostly old URLs of sites in development that redirect to the actual client sites. Many are several years old. Any idea why Google would be indexing these pages?
Thanks in advance!
-
Agreeing with Brent on password-protection. And everything else he said.
Also, if these are CMS-driven sites, I can almost guarantee you you've got paths pointing back to the dev-version. Probably absolute links to images and such. I've had that happen before. Remove the database and files from your dev directories and see what breaks on the live-site
-
I guess my question is why would you have to 301 redirect from your development (staging) site to the client's live site if you had nofollow, noindex? Google should not know about the dev site, or even be able to access it.
Sounds like in the new client site there are links going back to the development site. (maybe rel=canonical). Or there is a link out there linking to content you don't want found.
Google's not going to index it unless it finds it. Just jump into Google Webmaster and remove those directories.
Remember, noindex,nofollow or robots.txt are not 100% answers. You should make these sites password protected.
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
-
SEO Redirect
If we have several hundred domain names currently using a park page, would we be better served having them redirect to our corporate homepage for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | mkessler0 -
Canonical URL
Hi there Our website www.snowbusiness.com has a non www version and this one has 398 backlinks. What is the best way of transfering this link value if i establish the www. address as the canonical URL? Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | SnowFX0 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
Changing all urls
A client of mine has a wordpress website that is installed in a directory, called "site". So when you go to www.domain.com you are redirected to www.domain.com/site. We all know how bad it is to have a redirect fron your subdomain to another page. In this case I measured a loss of 5 points of page authority. The question is: what is the best practice to remove the "site" from the address and changing all the urls? Should I use the webmaster tool to tell to Google that the site is moving? It's not 100% true, cause the site is just moving one level up. Should I install a copy of the website under www.domain.com and just redirect 301 every old page to its new url? This way I think the site would be deindexet for 2/3 months. Any suggestions or tips welcome! Thanks DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Multiple URLs
I'm trying to check the URLs of this site- http://www.ofo.com.au, and I see that their old site has 301 re-directed to it...but the site http://ofo.com.au and http://outdoorfurnitureoutlet.com.au are both still up and I can't see any 301 redirects from them. Is it a problem even if when I do a site: search for them I get no results?
Technical SEO | | UnaRealidad0 -
Considering redirecting my site from .com/us to just .com. What could the possible SERP consequences?
Today we use country-specific .tlds but have the US site on .com/us; .com is now a 'flag-site.' Ikea uses that structure too (.com/.com/us). Looking potential risk to redirecting current US site to .com.
Technical SEO | | KnutDSvendsen0 -
Blog URLs
I read somewhere - pretty sure is was in Art of SEO - that having dates in the blog permalink URLs was a bad idea. e.g. /blog/2011/3/my-blog-post/ However, looking at Wordpress best practice, it's also not a good idea to have a URL without a number - it's more resource hungry if you don't , apparently. e.g. /blog/my-blog-post/ Does anyone have any views on this? Thanks Ben
Technical SEO | | atticus70