Duplicate content from development website
-
Hi all - I've been trawling for duplicate content and then I stumbled across a development URL, set up by a previous web developer, which nearly mirrors current site (few content and structure changes since then, but otherwise it's all virtually the same). The developer didn't take it down when the site was launched.
I'm guessing the best thing to do is tell him to take down the development URL (which is specific to the pizza joint btw, immediately. Is there anything else I should ask him to do?
Thanks, Luke
-
Well when I did it I put one removal request in for the whole domain and also put a disallow in the robots.txt for the whole site. Matt appears to be referring to putting in to many removal requests, but if you want your whole site removing you only need one so this wouldn't be an issue - you put your domain URL in. When you say your page has no snippet have you checked what your meta description is as this can help influence your snippet text. I would work at getting your development site removed a.s.a.p and then seeing what happens with your snippet - I think that there is a good chance it could be down to duplicate content issues. Have you checked what the cache for your homepage is in Googles results?
-
Hello Max!
Thank you very much for your answer!
First of all... no, i didn't have analytics or webmaster tools on the development site, i just set up google webmaster tools yesterday to put the removal request. There are ~1800 pages from the dev site indexed and i was removing them one by one when i found this artlicle bu Matt Cutts so i stopped removing:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/overdoing-url-removals/
Do you think it would be a good idea to keep doing it?
As far as i have seen, the development site is not outranking the main site but my concern is that the main site home page is showing up in SERP with no snippet so i'm wondering if it´s related somehow with the duplicated content issue.
Regarding your suggestion, DEFINITELLY... that's the type of things that you assume the development company would take care of... I already asked them to add HTTP authentication to the development site!
I really hope Google gets the change soon!
Thank you very much for your help, i really appreciate it!
Un abrazo
-
Hi Max
A couple of questions to understand your situation better - do you have both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools installed on your development site? Is your development site out ranking your main site for any of your key terms?
In my experience unless your development site is out ranking your main site I would add a robots.txt file to disallow all bot access and then I would also put in a removal request for your domain on Google Webmaster Tools. I found this fix very quick - within a matter of days everything was fixed.
However if you feel that you are getting traffic to your development site and it is out ranking your main site, so you have decided that the rel canonical option is best I would still remove your development site when rankings swap around (as Marie pointed out this took a week or so for her).
In regards to your development site I would always aim to have it removed from the index and when you have your issues sorted I would place a password on the whole site so that nobody can access it other than you or someone that has the password. This will allow you to use your development site to its full potential and not have to worry about competitors that have found the URL monitoring your development site even when it is de-indexed!
BTW when I had this issue I had several thousand pages indexed in Google from my development site. Unfortunately I can't give you an exact time as to how long it will take to fix this issue as it all depends on the current crawl rates to your sites.
Hope this helps!
-
I'm having a very similar problem... the development site got crawled and it has 1700+ pages indexed in Google. I'm working to redirect every page from the development site to its equivalent in the production site.
There's something else that i don't understand... the home page of the production site is not showing any snippet in SERPs.. do you think this can be caused by the duplication issue with the development site?
After redirecting from development to production, how long do you think it will take google to reindex everything and understand that there's no duplicated content anymore?
I would really appreciate your opinions!
Un abrazo
-
Thanks so much Matt, Kerie & Marie - brilliant advice there - really brilliant. With your help it's all removed now.
Blimey, that discovery sure set my heart racing (eeeek.)
-
Thanks Keri, great advice on the use of a code monitor - I have known the situation to occur where code changes have been made to development sites and the robots.txt has been changed or removed by mistake causing the development site to be indexed again. Monitoring this would have helped react to this situation so much quicker!
-
I had a similar situation where I had developed a site for a landscaping client. I thought I had gotten rid of the files but somehow Google found them. My development site ranked #1 for his terms and his site was on something like page 6 because it was duplicate content. Here's what I did:
I didn't want to take down my site right away because his company was ranking #1 for his keywords. (Even though they landed on the development site they still had his phone number to call.)
I added a rel canonical to the development site that told Google that the correct site to index was actually the client's site.
Within a week or so, the proper site was ranking #1. At that point I deleted the files for the development site.
-
Excellent advice here. If it's on a subdomain, the subdomain can be claimed in GWT as its own site. You can put a robots.txt on the subdomain then request the entire subdomain be removed from the index.
You may want to go one step further and use something like PolePosition's Code Monitor that checks the code of any page once per day and alerts you if there's a change. In a similar situation, I had it monitor the robots.txt for the live and all development sites for where I was working, so I knew if the developers changed something and could react quickly.
-
Hi Luke
I had the same problem and this is how I fixed it - I registered the development domain with GWT and then put in a removal request. I also got our developers to setup a robot.txt file to tell search engines not to index any of the site - the contents of the robots.txt file are as follows:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
This soon fixed the issue for us. Hope this helps - obviously you don't need the robots.txt if your are just going to take the site down completely as there will be no worry of people finding it in search engines and mistaking it for your live site or search engines finding duplicate content. I used this strategy as we still use the development site for testing etc before going live.
Can I just check is the URL on a separate domain? If it isn't and it is part of your existing domain for instance you can still block that URL using either a robots.txt file or a no index, no follow meta tag. You can also request removal of specific URL's within a site in GWT.
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
-
Duplicate Content Dilemma for Category and Brand Pages
Hi, I have a online shop with categories such as: Trousers Shirts Shoes etc. But now I'm having a problem with further development.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
I'd like to introduce brand pages. In this case I would create new categories for Brand 1, Brand 2, etc... The text on categories and brand pages would be unique. But there will be an overlap in products. How do I deal with this from a duplicate content perspective? I'm appreciate your suggestions. Best, Robin0 -
Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?
Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action. I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings. If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index? The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update. The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text. As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update. One last question: The page completely dropped from the search index. If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position? If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content
We have recently moved our company's blog to Wordpress on a subdomain (we utilize the Yoast SEO plugin). We are now experiencing an ever-growing volume of crawl errors (nearly 300 4xx now) for pages that do not exist to begin with. I believe it may have something to do with having the blog on a subdomain and/or our yoast seo plugin's indexation archives (author, category, etc) --- we currently have Subpages of archives and taxonomies, and category archives in use. I'm not as familiar with Wordpress and the Yoast SEO plugin as I am with other CMS' so any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. I can PM further info if necessary. Thank you for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BethA0 -
Multiple cities/regions websites - duplicate content?
We're about to launch a second site for a different, neighbouring city in which we are going to setup a marketing campaign to target sales in that city (which will also have a separate office there as well). We are going to have it under the same company name, but different domain name and we're going to do our best to re-write the text content as much as possible. We want to avoid Google seeing this as a duplicate site in any way, but what about: the business name the toll free number (which we would like to have same on both sites) the graphics/image files (which we would like to have the same on both sites) site structure, coding styles, other "forensic" items anything I might not be thinking of... How are we best to proceed with this? What about cross-linking the sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webdesignbarrie0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi I installed a wiki and a forum to subdomains of one of my sites. The crawl report shows me duplicate content on the forum and on wiki. This will hurt the main site? Or the root domain? the site by the way is clean absolutely from errors. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Fixing Duplicate Content Errors
SEOMOZ Pro is showing some duplicate content errors and wondered the best way to fix them other than re-writing the content. Should I just remove the pages found or should I set up permanent re-directs through to the home page in case there is any link value or visitors on these duplicate pages? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
Concerns about duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years. The url is www.betterbraces.com. We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website. The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products. The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues. However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-2836690 -
How to deal with category browsing and duplicate content
On an ecommerce site there are typically a lot of pages that may appear to be duplications due to category browse results where the only difference may be the sorting by price or number of products per page. How best to deal with this? Add nofollow to the sorting links? Set canonical values that ignore these variables? Set cononical values that match the category home page? Is this even a possible problem with Panda or spiders in general?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0