Why is the Site indexed?
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Hi,
I'm trying to test a few things for which I've registered and set up new domains.
For the set up I used Wordpress.
Each Site has about three articles in it but no links pointing to them. Also I didn't take any measures to get my site indexed.
However, one week later all my sites were indexed. Why is that and how can it be?
I'm thankful for any answer since the problem is really ruining my test environment.
The only clue I have, as to why this could be happening, is that I didn't remove the ping sites.Is that the reason? Or are there also other reasons?
Thanks
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I'd defiinitely recommend a password protect or IP included list at .htaccess. From experience I've found that Google tends to ignore no index when you're trying to keep a test environment under wraps. Even worse, if your site is large you can end up with visitors accessing this in error. Maybe add it to GWT but ensure that it is clearly marked to be excluded from the index. Add the .htaccess with an IP allowed list only and add the no-index clearly to each page.
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What we do for our test environments is password protect the root directory with .htaccess, this can be a test directory on a live domain, or it can be the whole domain depending on needs. This works great when its just you and a handful of people who need access to the site.
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It'll be because, as you say, you didn't stop them from being pinged. You should have set up the websites robot.txt to prevent any premature crawling. You can also do this in the WP dashboard, under settings, I believe.
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