Staging site - Treated as duplicate?
-
Last week (exactly 8 days ago to be precise) my developer created a staging/test site to test some new features. The staging site duplicated the entire existing site on the same server.
To explain this better -My site address is - www.mysite.com
The path of the new staging site was www.mysite/staging
I realized this only today and have immediately restricted robot text and put a no index no follow on the entire duplicate server folder but I am sure that Google would have indexed the duplicate content by now?
So far I do not see any significant drop in traffic but should I be worried? and what if anything can I do at this stage?
-
Yes, it would show up in your analytics as an active user but the fact that the query returns no results means it's not been indexed. All good.
Peter
-
Hey Peter,
The Analytics code could have helped to get the site indexed. Or even a G +1/Facebook Like/share/Stumble/etc button clicked by error.
@Rajat
Doing the search Peter suggested should return any indexed page.
-
Got it. No, no results show up but interestingly when I go to www.mysite.com/staging, it does show up as 1active user on analytic report, which is what got me worried and made me realize of this problem.
-
Hi Rajat,
No what I mean is put the following query into the search box
site:<yourdomainname>/<yourstagingfolder></yourstagingfolder></yourdomainname>
where yourdomainname is your domain name (e.g. mysite.com) and yourstagingfolder is your staging folder (e.g. staging), so ike this:
site:mysite.com/staging
Peter
-
Thanks Pete. When I search for mysite.com/staging on google, I only see mysite.com as first result...and nothing at all on staging. Is that what you mean I should check?
-
Hi Rajat
The analytics code may have given some signals to Google of pages to index but to test it the staging server's pages are in Google use site:mysite.com/staging (NB. no spaces between site and the domain name).
Peter
-
Thanks Federico. That's re-assuring. Also, a related point, since the whole site was duplicated, so was the Google analytic code.
Does that have any impact?
Also, is there a way to check if the test server was in fact indexed or not?
-
Hi Rajat
I agree with Federico. Also, if there was no active link on mysite.com to mysite.com/staging then it's unlikely Google would have found it unless the staging site had been submitted to Google via a sitemap for indexing. You should be fine.
Peter
-
You have done the necessary steps (disallowing in robots plus setting a noindex tag). There's shouldn't be anything to worry about. If you want to be entirely sure, you can add some HTTP authentication to the folder so only those knowing the credentials can access (you could find that some robots may not follow the disallow flag or noindex tag).
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
-
Is it a good idea to 301 redirect one same niche site towards another site for seo benefit
Hello friends, I have 2 android niche sites, one site is running on a technology dropped domain i catch 1 year ago it has, almost 400+ domains linking to different parts of the site, the other one i established from scratch and both are running from jan 2015. Now i want to redirect first site which already has 400 links pointing towards it to the home page of my 2nd android site. Is it a good idea to do so and does it give any boost in terms of seo?
Algorithm Updates | | RizwanAkbar0 -
Google indexing https sites by default now, where's the Moz blog about it!
Hello and good morning / happy Friday! Last night an article from of all places " Venture Beat " titled " Google Search starts indexing and letting users stream Android apps without matching web content " was sent to me, as I read this I got a bit giddy. Since we had just implemented a full sitewide https cert rather than a cart only ssl. I then quickly searched for other sources to see if this was indeed true, and the writing on the walls seems to indicate so. Google - Google Webmaster Blog! - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-prioritize-the-indexing-of-https-pages/147179/ http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-indexing-https-by-default,30781.html https://hacked.com/google-will-begin-indexing-httpsencrypted-pages-default/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-app-indexing-documentation-updated-21345.html I found it a bit ironic to read about this on mostly unsecured sites. I wanted to hear about the 8 keypoint rules that google will factor in when ranking / indexing https pages from now on, and see what you all felt about this. Google will now begin to index HTTPS equivalents of HTTP web pages, even when the former don’t have any links to them. However, Google will only index an HTTPS URL if it follows these conditions: It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies. It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt. It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. It doesn’t have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page. It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag. It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs. The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL. The server has a valid TLS certificate. One rule that confuses me a bit is : **It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. ** Does this mean if you just moved over to https from http your site won't pick up the https boost? Since most sites in general have http redirects to https? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | Deacyde0 -
Penguin 3.0 Site Dropped after Update
Hi We was hit by the Penguin update a long time ago and we lost a lot of traffic/positions because of this. For a long time we worked really hard to identify all off our links that may have caused us to recieve this penalty. After Months of work we submitted the disavow file and reconsideration request and in June 2014 we recieved confirmation from google in webmaster tools that the manual spam action had been revoked. over time we then started to recieve more traffic and better positions in the serps, however since penguin 3.0 we have dropped again for a range of keywords. many going from page 1 to 2 or page 2 to 3/4 Any ideas what we should do here , any help will be really appriciated as I'm totally confused We havent done any link building at all since the penalty / recovery
Algorithm Updates | | AMG1000 -
Duplicate content on a sub domain
I have two domains www.hairremoval.com and a sub domain www.us.hairromoval.com both sites have virtual the same content apart from around 8 pages and the sub domain is more focused to US customers so the spelling are different, it is also hosted in the states. Would this be classed as duplicate content ? (The url’s are made up for the question but the format is correct)
Algorithm Updates | | Nettitude0 -
How can I use Intuit without getting duplicate content issues
All of my Intuit site show duplicate content on the index pages. How can I avoid this
Algorithm Updates | | onestrohm0 -
If the homepage is sandboxed for a keyword is the whole site sandboxed for that keyword?
If the homepage of a website has been sandboxed for certain keywords does this mean that the whole site is sandboxed for them keywords or just the homepage? If a new sub-page was created with quality unique content, would it be possible to get that sub-page ranked for the same keywords that have been sandboxed on the homepage? I have asked many other SEO professionals this same question and nobody really knows for sure. Do you?
Algorithm Updates | | Mark A Preston0 -
Why have organic hits to my site suddenly started to fluctuate widely?
Hits to my website have been gradually growing over the last 2 years to a point where there was 1300 organics a day. Recently the hits crashed to 300 a day and stayed there for a couple of days. They then bounced back to 1300 a day for a few more days before crashing down to 300 again. This has happened a few times now. Oscillating between two points. Its like the site is crossing a threshold of something, back and forth. I have looked at different parts of my site and every part is down by approximately the same percentage. Anyone out there have any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | easymatt0 -
What to do with eCommerce site with color variations of the same product?
On our eCommerce website we sell products that each have about 20 color variations. When the site was built each color variation was added individually instead as a single product with a configurable color option. Would it be best to combine the different variations into a single product with a configurable drop down menu for color or to leave as is? I am worried the search engines see the individual product pages for each color as duplicate content. What are your thoughts on how Zappos handles color variations? On the category page they display each color variation as an individual product but when the product is clicked it goes to a single product page with the different configurable color variations. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jchosler1