Hi I know this is cheeky but you are all so helpful on here!

[SussexChef83]

hi, quick question, I've made a new instillation of wordpress at sussexchef.com/dev and I'm about to start building pages, obvoisly I'm going to move it to sussexchef.com when its all looking right. when I choose my page address links/ permalinks thingy, should I use new url names that don't already exist on the old site? or should I keep the old url names so I don't get loads of 404's, but include the "dev/" in the url name?

Eg the old address sussexchef.com/home

should I use sussexchef.com/dev/home or sussexchef.com/home-sussex-caterers while building the development site? I'm guessing the later my help out in google searches too?

But if I use Dev in the url shurly I will have to go through almost 100 pages removing the dev/ and also changing all the links too? This would be days of work!
So confused!

I'd really appreciate your help here.

Ben

[Houses]

Hi,

That should be enough to stop the search engines crawling and indexing the test site.

Remember to take it off when you go live though.

[SussexChef83]

Hi Guys and girls.

Thanks for the input, I'm not a web developer or an Seo expert, I'm a Chef, I found all the content on Moz amazing! not only has the using moz helped my web rankings its made My wife and I take on a whole new approach to marketing.

Not to mention all you guys are so happy to help out a novice

As for making the dev site Un-crawlable If ticked "discourage search engines from crawling this site" in the reading settings in wordpress, Is that enough or should I do something else too? I'm focusing all my time on building the now site, Should I run of and learn about robots txt file right away or should it be ok for now?

Thanks for your help!

[Houses]

Hi,

If the dev site can't be crawled (which is generally the idea), it doesn't matter what you call the URL's on the test site.

If the URL's on the old site are good, keep the same names for the new one to avoid the need for 301's. If the URL's could be better though, change them but 301 the old pages to the relevant new ones.

Hope that helps

[Andy-Halliday]

Surely if you are building this in dev, the new site isn't craw able anyway so I don't know what the issues are.

Always recommend building new sites and making sure Google or any bot / human cannot see them anyway - as there are usually quite a few errors during build, so wouldn't want someone to accidentally find the dev site and get a bad brand experience,

But on the url side of thing, build it without the dev in the url.