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.
How to prevent development website subdomain from being indexed?
-
Hello awesome MOZ Community!
Our development team uses a sub-domain "dev.example.com" for our SEO clients' websites. This allows changes to be made to the dev site (U/X changes, forms testing, etc.) for client approval and testing.
An embarrassing discovery was made. Naturally, when you run a "site:example.com" the "dev.example.com" is being indexed. We don't want our clients websites to get penalized or lose killer SERPs because of duplicate content.
The solution that is being implemented is to edit the robots.txt file and block the dev site from being indexed by search engines.
My questions is, does anyone in the MOZ Community disagree with this solution? Can you recommend another solution? Would you advise against using the sub-domain "dev." for live and ongoing development websites?
Thanks!
-
Hey there, in addition to Oleg's comment you can add an htpasswd file to your server to require a username and password to be entered before any users or robots are allowed to access your website.
You can find information on setting this up here.
-
Thanks for your prompt feedback Oleg!
Your proposed action is exactly what we're implementing.
Randy Holland, Sprout Digital
-
So....
- If the dev site has not been indexed yet, you can block crawlers via robots.txt
- If the dev site is already indexed and you want it removed, add meta NOINDEX tag to all pages allow the site to be crawled via robots.txt (reason: you want google to crawl and noticed the noindex tag on the pages so that they remove it from search results. if the site is indexed and you block crawler via robots.txt, google will keep the pages indexed but won't crawl them again). Once deindexed, you can block via robots.txt again
As long as its blocked (and you build that into your process), having the dev site on the same domain shouldn't be an issue. We have our own dev domain + server that autoblocks all pages from being indexed.
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
-
Weird Layout on Initial Website Load?
Whenever I open my site from an uncached source, like google incognito, for a split second it displays purple links and a white background while it loads the rest of the content. I've included a screenshot. Is there any way to fix that.? The site is www.kemprugegreen.com. u8P9q
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
What is the best way to handle annual events on a website?
Every year our company has a user conference with between 300 - 400 attendees. I've just begun giving the event more of a presence on our website. I'm wondering, what is the best way to handle highlights from previous years? Would it be to create an archive (e.g. www.companyname.com/eventname/2015) while constantly updating the main landing page to promote the current event? We also use an event website (cvent) to handle our registrations. So once we have an agenda for the current years event I do a temporary redirect from the main landing page to the registration website. I don't really like this practice and I feel like it might be better to keep all of the info on the main domain. Wondering if anybody has any opinions or feedback on that process as well. Just looking for best practices or what others have done and have had success with.
Web Design | | Brando161 -
Website Redesign and Migration to Squarespace killed my Ranking
My old website was dated, ugly, impossible to update and a mess between hard-coded pages and WP, but we were ranking #1 in the organic searches for our key words. I just redesigned my website using Squarespace. I kept most of the same text on the pages (for key words) and kept the same Meta-Tags and Title Tags for each page as much as possible. Once I was satisfied that I had done as much on-page optimization as I could, I changed the IP in our Domain Name Registry so that it would point to our new website on the Squarespace host. And our new website was live! ...Then I watched in dismay as our ranking fell into oblivion. I think this might have something to do with not doing any 301 redirects from the old website and losing all of my link juice. Is this the case? And, if so, how do I fix it? Our website url is www.kanataskinclinic.ca Thanks
Web Design | | StillLearning1 -
Https pages indexed but all web pages are http - please can you offer some help?
Dear Moz Community, Please could you see what you think and offer some definite steps or advice.. I contacted the host provider and his initial thought was that WordPress was causing the https problem ?: eg when an https version of a page is called, things like videos and media don't always show up. A SSL certificate that is attached to a website, can allow pages to load over https. The host said that there is no active configured SSL it's just waiting as part of the hosting package just in case, but I found that the SSL certificate is still showing up during a crawl.It's important to eliminate the https problem before external backlinks link to any of the unwanted https pages that are currently indexed. Luckily I haven't started any intense backlinking work yet, and any links I have posted in search land have all been http version.I checked a few more url's to see if it’s necessary to create a permanent redirect from https to http. For example, I tried requesting domain.co.uk using the https:// and the https:// page loaded instead of redirecting automatically to http prefix version. I know that if I am automatically redirected to the http:// version of the page, then that is the way it should be. Search engines and visitors will stay on the http version of the site and not get lost anywhere in https. This also helps to eliminate duplicate content and to preserve link juice. What are your thoughts regarding that?As I understand it, most server configurations should redirect by default when https isn’t configured, and from my experience I’ve seen cases where pages requested via https return the default server page, a 404 error, or duplicate content. So I'm confused as to where to take this.One suggestion would be to disable all https since there is no need to have any traces to SSL when the site is even crawled ?. I don't want to enable https in the htaccess only to then create a https to http rewrite rule; https shouldn't even be a crawlable function of the site at all.RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTPS} offor to disable the SSL completely for now until it becomes a necessity for the website.I would really welcome your thoughts as I'm really stuck as to what to do for the best, short term and long term.Kind Regards
Web Design | | SEOguy10 -
Website Redesign - What to do with old 301 URLs?
My current site is on wordpress. We are currently designing a new wordpress site, with the same URLs. Our current approach is to go into the server, delete the current website files and ad the new website files. My current site has old urls which are 301 redirected to current urls. Here is my question. In the current redesign process, do i need to create pages for old the 301 redirected urls so that we do not lose them in the launch of the new site? or is the 301 command currently existing outside of our server so this does not matter? Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | CamiloSC0 -
Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content
I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution. Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container Happens while on the company network, as well as externally Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps Codebase is .net Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it. I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz Linking to an image example below knEUzqd
Web Design | | CliqStudios0 -
Subdomains For Real Estate Website
I am currently working on a proposal for a clients Wordpress website development which includes ongoing SEO after the website is developed. I have looked into a number of options and the one that seems the most cost effective involves using subdomains for the individual listings pages. What I want: clientsdomain.com/listings/idxnumber/ What I can get for a decent price: listings.clientsdomain.com/idxnumber/ So the majority of the website will actually exist on a subdomain because the IDX API will automatically populate pages for all of the MLS listings in the area (hundreds or thousands). Meanwhile the domain itself will have all the neighborhood pages and other optimized content, blogs and whatnot. My concern is that dividing the website like this will have negative effects on SEO. There wont be duplicate content across subdomain and main domain, but they will share a lot of links back and forth. I haven't found any recent sources on the topic. Almost everything I have found says that dividing a website in this manor is bad for SEO, but these articles are often many years old. Does anyone know of a Wordpress plugin/IDX company that can provide a solution that doesn't use a subdomain and actually just lists each MLS page within a directory? I am open to using another platform, I am just most familiar with Wordpress. Will using a subdomain in the ways mentioned above have a profound negative effect on SEO? Thank you for your time in responding, I greatly appreciate it.
Web Design | | TotalMarketExposure0 -
Duplicate Content for index.html
In the Crawl Diagnostics Summary, it says that I have two pages with duplicate content which are: www.mywebsite.com/ www.mywebsite.com/index.html I read in a Dream Weaver tutorial that you should name your home page "index.html" and then you can let www.mywebsite.com automatically direct the user to index.html. Is this a bug in SEOMoz's crawler or is it a real problem with my site? Thank you, Dan
Web Design | | superTallDan0