Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index
-
I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains!
I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google:
Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index?
We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it?
I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all.
The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually.
Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?
-
Why couldn't I just put a password on the staging site, and let Google sort out the rest? Just playing devil's advocate.
-
If you've enough time to verify each subdomain in WMT and also removing 400+ domains one by one, then you can go for solution 2. You can't remove subdomain from verified WMT account of main domain, that's why you need to verify each domain.
Adding canonical is a better option, it wouldn't remove all of the demo domains from Google's index rapidly, you have to wait for few months, but you'll be on the safe side.
-
Out of curiosity, why wouldn't you recommend solution 2?
You mentioned that you faced a similar kind of situation in the past, how did that work out? Which of the 3 solutions (or all) did you opt for?
-
Good advice but an IP restriction for the demo sites won't be possible on this occasion as our router throws out a range of different IP addresses and we occasionally need the sites to be viewed externally! Any other suggestions to help?
-
I'd also recommend putting in an IP restriction for any of the demo sites.
So that if anyone visits the demo sites from a non-whitelisted IP address, then you can display an error message, or simply redirect them over to the live site.
That will likely have the search results quickly removed from the search engine.
Hope this helps!
-- Jeff
-
Solution 1:
Add robots.txt on all demo domains and block them, or add noindex in their header.
Solution 2: Verify each domain in webmaster tools and remove it entirely from the link removal section ( I wouldn't recommend this).
Solution 3:
If your both domains like agency1.domain.com and demo.agency1.domain.com have same coding and are clone then you should just add canonical url to the agency1.domain.com and canonical will be http://agency.domain.com/ it will work if it will be automatically shown in the demo domain. if it doesn't show up in the demo domain automatically then add the same canonical to the demo domain.
It will take some time to deindexed from serps, but it will surely work. I've faced the same kind of situation in past.
-
Noindex is your best option, really. It might take weeks, but I don't think any other method is going to be faster. Plus, technically speaking, "noindex" is the proper method for what you want to do - canonical tags or a robots.txt may do the job, but they aren't exactly the right way.
Good luck!
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
-
New Subdomain & Best Way To Index
We have an ecommerce site, we'll say at https://example.com. We have created a series of brand new landing pages, mainly for PPC and Social at https://sub.example.com, but would also like for these to get indexed. These are built on Unbounce so there is an easy option to simply uncheck the box that says "block page from search engines", however I am trying to speed up this process but also do this the best/correct way. I've read a lot about how we should build landing pages as a sub-directory, but one of the main issues we are dealing with is long page load time on https://example.com, so I wanted a kind of fresh start. I was thinking a potential solution to index these quickly/correctly was to make a redirect such as https://example.com/forward-1 -> https:sub.example.com/forward-1 then submit https://example.com/forward-1 to Search Console but I am not sure if that will even work. Another possible solution was to put some of the subdomain links accessed on the root domain say right on the pages or in the navigation. Also, will I definitely be hurt by 'starting over' with a new website? Even though my MozBar on my subdomain https://sub.example.com has the same domain authority (DA) as the root domain https://example.com? Recommendations and steps to be taken are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markbwc0 -
6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash
i've to give some information about my website Environment 1. i have static webpage in the root. 2. Wordpress installed in sub-dictionary www.domain.com/blog/ 3. I have two .htaccess , one in the root and one in the wordpress
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeatIT
folder. i want to www to non on all URLs Remove index.html from url Remove all .html extension / Re-direct 301 to url
without .html extension Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Some examples domain.tld/index.html >> domain.tld/ domain.tld/file.html >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/file.html/ >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/wordpress/post-name >> domain.tld/wordpress/post-name/ My code in ROOT htaccess is <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / #removing trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> The above code do 1. redirect www to non-www
2. Remove trailing slash at the end (if exists)
3. Remove index.html
4. Remove all .html
5. Redirect 301 to filename but doesn't add trailing slash at the end0 -
Problems in indexing a website built with Magento
Hi all My name is Riccardo and i work for a web marketing agency. Recently we're having some problem in indexing this website www.farmaermann.it which is based on Magento. In particular considering google web master tools the website sitemap is ok (without any error) and correctly uploaded. However only 72 of 1.772 URL have been indexed; we sent the sitemap on google webmaster tools 8 days ago. We checked the structure of the robots.txt consulting several Magento guides and it looks well structured also.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advmedialab
In addition to this we noticed that some pages in google researches have different titles and they do not match the page title defined in Magento backend. To conclude we can not understand if this indexing problems are related to the website sitemap, robots.txt or something else.
Has anybody had the same kind of problems? Thank you all for your time and consideration Riccardo0 -
Proper 301 in Place but Old Site Still Indexed In Google
So i have stumbled across an interesting issue with a new SEO client. They just recently launched a new website and implemented a proper 301 redirect strategy at the page level for the new website domain. What is interesting is that the new website is now indexed in Google BUT the old website domain is also still indexed in Google? I even checked the Google Cached date and it shows the new website with a cache date of today. The redirect strategy has been in place for about 30 days. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to get the old domain un-indexed in Google and get all authority passed to the new website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Index process multi language website for different countries
We are in charge of a website with 7 languages for 16 countries. There are only slight content differences by countries (google.de | google.co.uk). The website is set-up with the correct language & country annotation e.g. de/DE/ | de/CH/ | en/GB/ | en/IE. All unwanted annotations are blocked by robots.txt. The «hreflang alternate» are also set. The objective is, to make the website visible in local search engines. Therefore we have submitted a overview sitemap connected with a sitemap per country. The sitemap has been submitted now for quite a while, but Google has indexed only 10 % of the content. We are looking for suggestion to boost the index process.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imsi0 -
Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?
I did a quick search for "site:bit.ly" and it returns more than 10 million results. Given that bit.ly links are 301 redirects, why are they being indexed in Google and ranked according to their destination? I'm working on a similar project to bit.ly and I want to make sure I don't run into the same problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB1 -
Best possible linking on site with 100K indexed pages
Hello All, First of all I would like to thank everybody here for sharing such great knowledge with such amazing and heartfelt passion.It really is good to see. Thank you. My story / question: I recently sold a site with more than 100k pages indexed in Google. I was allowed to keep links on the site.These links being actual anchor text links on both the home page as well on the 100k news articles. On top of that, my site syndicates its rss feed (Just links and titles, no content) to this page. However, the new owner made a mess, and now the site could possibly be seen as bad linking to my site. Google tells me within webmasters that this particular site gives me more than 400K backlinks. I have NEVER received one single notice from Google that I have bad links. That first. But, I was worried that this page could have been the reason why MY site tanked as bad as it did. It's the only source linking so massive to me. Just a few days ago, I got in contact with the new site owner. And he has taken my offer to help him 'better' his site. Although getting the site up to date for him is my main purpose, since I am there, I will also put effort in to optimizing the links back to my site. My question: What would be the best to do for my 'most SEO gain' out of this? The site is a news paper type of site, catering for news within the exact niche my site is trying to rank. Difference being, his is a news site, mine is not. It is commercial. Once I fix his site, there will be regular news updates all within the niche we both are in. Regularly as in several times per day. It's news. In the niche. Should I leave my rss feed in the side bars of all the content? Should I leave an achor text link on the sidebar (on all news etc.) If so: there can be just one keyword... 407K pages linking with just 1 kw?? Should I keep it to just one link on the home page? I would love to hear what you guys think. (My domain is from 2001. Like a quality wine. However, still tanked like a submarine.) ALL SEO reports I got here are now Grade A. The site is finally fully optimized. Truly nice to have that confirmation. Now I hope someone will be able to tell me what is best to do, in order to get the most SEO gain out of this for my site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | richardo24hr0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0