Staging site - Treated as duplicate?

[rajatsharma]

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?

[crackingmedia]

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

[FedeEinhorn]

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.

[rajatsharma]

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.

[crackingmedia]

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

[rajatsharma]

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?

[crackingmedia]

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

[rajatsharma]

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?

[crackingmedia]

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

[FedeEinhorn]

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).