Development/Test Ecommerce Website Mistakenly Indexed
-
My question is - relatively speaking, how damaging to SEO is it to have BOTH your development/testing site and your live version indexed/crawled by Google and appearing in the SERPs?
We just launched about a month ago, and made a change to the robots text on the development site without noticing ... which lead to it being indexed too.So now the ecommerce website is duplicated in Google ... each under different URLs of course (and on diff servers, DNS etc)
We'll fix it right away ... and block crawlers to the development site. But again, may general question is what is the general damage to SEO ... if any ... created by this kind of mistake. My feeling is nothing significant
-
No my friend, no! I'm saying we'll point the existing staging/testing environment to the production version and will stop using it as staging instead of closing it completely like I mentioned earlier. And, we'll launch a fresh instance for staging/testing use case.
This will help us transferring majority if the link juice of already indexed staging/testing instance.
-
Why would you want to 301 a staging/dev environment to a production site? Unless you plan on making live changes to the production server (not safe), you'd want to keep them separate. Especially for eCommerce it would be important to have different environments to test and QA before pushing a change live. Making any change that impacts a number of pages could damage your ability to generate revenue from the site. You don't take down the development/testing site, because that's your safe environment to test changes before pushing updates to production.
I'm not sure I follow your recommendation. Am I missing a critical point?
-
Hi Eric,
Well, that's a valid point that bots might have considered your staging instances as the main website and hence, this could end up giving you nothing but a face palm.
The solution you suggested is similar to the one I suggested where we are not getting any benefit from the existing instance by removing it or putting noindex everywhere.
My bad! I assumed your staging/testing instance(s) got indexed recently only and are not very powerful from domain & page authority perspective. In fact, being a developer, I should have considered the worst case only
Thanks for pointing out the worst case Eric i.e when your staging/testing instances are decently old and you don't want to loose their SEO values while fixing this issue. And, here'e my proposed solution for it: don't removed the instance, don't even put a noindex everywhere. The better solution would be establishing a 301 redirect bridge from your staging/testing instance to your original website. In this case, ~90% of the link juice that your staging/testing instances have earned, will get passed. Make sure each and every URL of the staging/testing instance is properly 301 redirecting to the original instance.
Hope this helps!
-
It could hurt you in the long run (Google may decide the dev site is more relevant than your live site), but this is an easy fix. No-index your dev site. Just slap a site-wide noindex meta tag across all the pages, and when you're ready to move that code to the production site you remove that instance of code.
Disallowing from the robots.txt file will help, but that's a soft request. The best way to keep the dev site from being indexed is to use the noindex tag. Since it seems like you want to QA in a live environment that would prevent search engines from indexing the site, and still allow you to test in a production-like scenario.
-
Hey,
I recently faced the same issue when the staging instances got indexed accidentally and we were open for the duplicate content penalty (well, that's not cool). After a decent bit of research, I followed the following steps and got rid of this issue:
- I removed my staging instances i.e staging1.mysite.com, staging2.mysite.com and so on. Removing such instances helps you deindex already indexed pages faster than just blocking the whole website from robots.txt
- Relaunched the staging instances with a slightly different name like new-staging1.mysite.com, new-staging2.mysite.com and disallow bots on these instances from the day zero to avoid this mess again.
This helped me fixing this issue asap. Hope this helps!
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
-
MOZ is showing that I have non- indexed blog tag posts are they supposed to be nonindexed. My articles are indexed just not the blog tags that take you to other similar articles do I need to fix this or is it ok?
MOZ is showing that my blog post tags are not indexed my question is should they be indexed? my articles are indexed just not the tags that take you to posts that are similar. Do I need to fix this or not? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tyler58910 -
Why has my website been removed from Bing?
I have a website that has recently been removed from Bing's index, but can't figure out why. The website isn't new, and it is indexed just fine on Google. These are the steps I've tried: The website is verified in Bing Webmaster Tools and successfully submitted the sitemap. I tested the URL to ensure that Bingbot is allowed to crawl the site I submitted URLs to Bing via the URL Submission tool There isn't a "noindex" on the site preventing it from being indexed When I do a URL Inspection, an error message comes up saying "The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing us from serving it to our users. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines." I contacted Bing to ask whether the website was removed in error, but received a reply that the website doesn't comply with Bing's quality guidelines, but they wouldn't go into detail as to which guidelines the website isn't meeting. The website URL is https://www.pardeehospital.org. Can anyone offer any advice or insight as to why Bing won't index our site? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lindsey.steinkamp0 -
Ecommerce combating canabilsation
Hey Mozzers, I think i know the answer to this one but i just wanted to check my thinking if you wouldnt mind. I have an ecommerce website with lots of very similar products, for example Blue widget
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
Waterproof blue widget
Blue widget with Alarm One of the pages is ranking top 10 for "blue widget", however the other intermittently swap with it, knocking that page out and itself into the top 10. Then a few weeks later it swaps back again. This seems like a clear case of keyword canablisation to me. And i am wondering on the best solution. 301: Obviously not an answer as i need all 3 products visible
Canonical to one of the pages: Doesn't seem correct either, the products are similiar but not the same, all 3 could rank for different longtails etc I was suffering from something similiar on my closely related category pages and I combated that by interlinking them all with the relevant keywords to point to the relevant pages. Should i do the same for these products such as...
From 'Blue Widget' product link to "Blue widget with alarm" and "Waterproof Blue Widget"
From Waterproof blue widget and blue widget with alarm link to "Blue Widget" (using the anchor text in the ""). This should tell serps that all pages are about blue widget but the main one is the "blue widgets" page. Correct? As a follow up. Is this one of the reason ecommerce sights have related products options?0 -
HTTPS pages - To meta no-index or not to meta no-index?
I am working on a client's site at the moment and I noticed that both HTTP and HTTPS versions of certain pages are indexed by Google and both show in the SERPS when you search for the content of these pages. I just wanted to get various opinions on whether HTTPS pages should have a meta no-index tag through an htaccess rule or whether they should be left as is.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamie.Stevens0 -
How to Index Faster?
Hello, I have a new website and updated fresh content regularly. My indexing status is very slow. When I search how to improve my indexing rate by Google, I found most of the members of Moz community replied there is no certain technique to improve your indexing. Apart from this you should keep posting fresh content more and more and wait for Google Indexing. Some of them asked for submitting sitemap and share posts on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. Well the above comments are from the year of 2012. I'm curious to know is there any new technique or methods are used to improve indexing rate? Need your suggestions! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopLeagueTechnologies0 -
Home page not being indexed
Hi Moz crew. I have two sites (one is a client's and one is mine). They are both Wordpress sites and both are hosted on WP Engine. They have both been set up for a long time, and are "on-page" optimized. Pages from each site are indexed, but Google is not indexing the homepage for either site. Just to be clear - I can set up and work on a Wordpress site, but am not a programmer. Both seem to be fine according to my Moz dashboard. I have Webmaster tools set up for each - and as far as I can tell (definitely not an exper in webmaster tools) they are okay. I have done the obvious and checked that the the box preventing Google from crawling is not checked, and I believe I have set up the proper re-directs and canonicals.Thanks in advance! Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Are there any SEO Tips before killing a website?
Hey guys, My company acquired another company, and after a couple of months we decided to completely kill their website. I'm not finding any info about SEO best practices for this type of situation. From the "switching domains" and "new sites" articles and blog posts I can extrapolate that I should: 301 redirect their home page to ours Look at specific pages with good authority that relate to our pages and 301 them. Look at the strongest backlinks to their site and try to change them to point to our site. Create a 404 page for the rest of their webpages that tells them that we acquired the company (hopefully with a main menu and search bar) Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nrv0 -
Sitelinks in 7-pack / blended / local results
I have a client who has been ranking well in the 7-pack for local searches, for 1.5+ years. I recently noticed a competitor's Google Places link has little sitelinks attached, but my client's link doesn't have them. This makes me sad. To provide a concise question: what can I do to help my client get sitelinks along with his Google Places listing in the 7-pack / blended / local results? Some example data: My client's business is called Ambiance Dental and his website is www.mycalgarydentist.com. An example search to see what I'm talking about is "calgary family dentist". The competitor that's showing sitelinks is www.aestheticdentalstudio.ca which has a title of "Dentist in Calgary | Cosmetic Treatment in Calgary". The sitelinks you'll see are "Dr. Gordon Chee", "Links", "Dr. Alexa Geminiano". Notice that my client doesn't have the same sitelinks. Some further data: If you do a a search for "calgary aesthetic dentist" you'll see the competitor's 1-box local result (is that what it's called?) with his Google Places data and sitelinks. If you search for "calgary ambiance dentist" you'll get a similar layout SERP for my client, again with no sitelinks. My client's sitelinks: If you search for "ambiance dental calgary" you'll see that Google does offer sitelinks for his site, just not in Google Places it seems. My client's website: My client's website has the navigation coded as a list (UL) without any javascript or complicated code messing things up. The competitor's navigation is built similarly, though he has about 40 more pages in his main navigation. My client's page names are concise, which I've read helps with sitelinks, the website is coded very cleanly, the URLs of his site are clear and concise without a complicated folder structure, so it seems like we're doing everything right. I appreciate any input other mozzers can provide, and discussion on the topic. I'm sure there are others who would benefit from local sitelinks as well!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kenoshi0