Website preview

[RGOnline]

We have moved our site from one host to another, in the process we set up a web preview on the new server to iron out any issues before we repointed the domain.

this preview <cite>indigocarhire.co.uk.gridhosted.co.uk</cite> has been ranked by google and is appearing in the search results. We deleted the preview and lost a lot of results within the SERPS, so i had no choice but to switch this back on.

The host then set up a redirect from the preview to the actual site which saw our results reappear but how can i rectify this problem properly. I am worried that I will be punished but the search engines unless i sort this out asap

Appreciate any feedback and i do realise that this is not a MOZ issue but not sure where else to turn

Thanks

[RGOnline]

yes the preview is down but it did affect traffic. one lesson learned for next time

[KristinaKledzik]

Looks like you got some good advice, Robert! Did everything resolve itself? Were you able to take the preview down without hurting the rankings of your main site?

[SemZoom]

When Google does eventually realise that the site is not their you may receive crawl errors for anything you missed when you did your 301's. Its good practice to mark these as resolved via Google Webmasters.

Cheers

[KevinBudzynski]

If all the 301's are done correctly and the preview site is removed, you should be fine. No issues w/the search engine.

I know it's stressful, but will resolve itself given time.

[RGOnline]

will it just take time for the search engines to realise that the preview isnt there any more? will this cause me a problem with the search engines? We lost enough traffic with Pengiun

[RGOnline]

thanks for the advice, i check with the tool you mentioned and they all seem to be 301

[SemZoom]

Its important to make sure those re-directs are 301 redirects so the engines know that those pages have permanently moved.

Use a tool like http://web-sniffer.net/ to check the headers being sent by the pages being redirected to see how they are done.

[KevinBudzynski]

Yes, just do redirects from the staging site to the production site.