Website redesign testing environment
-
An external company is redesigning our website. They have a draft version active in a folder on their website to enable us to view it (example: www.externalcompanywebsite.com/ourwebsite/). There is no permission required to view the website, anyone with the url could just go there.
I am not sure if they're using the robots.txt to block crawlers, or if they're blocking specific ip addresses.
If the engines are allowed to crawl their website and they index pages of our draft website, does that affect our website negatively in the future once we host it on our domain?
-
It may depend on how the host of the draft version has it set up.
For example, Adobe Business Catalyst settings automatically block all test sites from being crawled by search engines.
Can you inquire if the search engines are allowed to crawl their archived or draft site? I have also been amazed at how many times someone puts a "back up" copy somewhere else on line. Opening up the discussion may save you duplicate content troubles ahead.
-
If they put up new content, and that content is the same you will be using.. make sure they take it down soon after you approve of the design. Otherwise I don't think there will be any problem for your website.
Only thing I can think of would be duplicate content.
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
-
Any risks involved when we have huge list of redirects in our website database?
Hi all, We have changed hundreds and thousands of page and page URLs for last 10 years in our website. So, now we are going to redirect most of the old pages/links to the current related pages. This will increase the number of redirects we set in our website database to thousands. Will this put any extra weight on crawler and any risks involved for employing too many redirects. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
What are the most common reasons for a website being slow to load
I've been advised that too many requests are being sent (presumably to the server?), how can I reduce these and were else should I look to increase speed?
Web Design | | FBS1 -
Website design chnage and massive traffic drop?
I changed my Drupal theme to "Bootstrap 3" and now my traffic is down 50% gradually in past 5 days, can this be theme related? Answers to checks below : 1). There were no redirects involved, I just flipped a switch and changed theme for my Drupal blog. 2). No issues reported by Google WMT except the fact that impressions fell, see stat images for comparison at - http://imgur.com/a/5PssH#0. 3). site:mysiteurl.com shows healthy "About 201,000 results". 4). Checked slow loading times and browser issue, nothing there. 5). It's not a seasonal drop. Pls. suggest what else should I focus upon to find the reason. @Prateek_Chandra where can I share my analytic report with you privately. I can also enable guest access to my account for you to have a look.
Web Design | | techdna11 -
Does meta "Expires" tag affect website cacheing or indexing?
One of our client has a meta expire tag across all pages of their website. Does that tag affect the website overall caching or indexing? Their website pages including home page is crawled every 10 days, however the website is popular high traffic websites, receiving 240,000 visits/month. Please advise what impact this tag will have on the website indexing and caching? Thanks Atomic Team
Web Design | | JamesDixon700 -
Best Practice For Website Redesign & Migration
Hi, I'm looking to redesign my current live website to a new Wordpress site using "Studiopress Enterprise Theme". I'm new to Wordpress and therefore will be embarking on lots of testing & development.
Web Design | | Mark_Ch
I do not want to hurt my current live website whilst testing the new Wordpress site. However, it would be nice to bring the test site into the current live environment without changing untold urls, etc. Question
What is the best practice to setup this new Wordpress environment for my domain: www.sampledomain.co.uk How would you restrict Google, Bing, etc from indexing, etc. whilst testing in the live environment. What other consideration should I be aware of Thanks Mark0 -
Where should I spend Money on my website?
My website is www.capitolshine.com what do you think? Where should I spend money to enhance SEO search results? I do have a limited budget but the company is growing quickly and I might have more funds to invest in a few months. Where should I spend money now (less than $500 per month) and where should I spend money in the future? I am afraid the person who coded my website wasn't well versed on SEO. There also might be coding errors. I'm trying to work through the errors myself via the repots from SEOmoz.
Web Design | | CapitolShine0 -
Removing important section of website, safely
Hi Mozzers, It's been requested that a top level page on a website I'm working on should be removed. It concerns me firstly because there are some nice links coming into that page. I'm also worried because website director has suggested the menu option for that page should simply be removed from all navigation, so you can't find the 'removed' page via his website, but it remains as an indexed page passing linkjuice to website. Is that a risky approach from an SEO perspective? What's the best approach to this? Thanks in advance! Luke
Web Design | | McTaggart0 -
Bing free mobile website
When editing my Bing business listing, I have noticed that they offer a free mobile website. I was actually looking to build one and I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for. I want to be able to customize it as well. Anybody tried it already? arBS3.jpg
Web Design | | echo10