Staging/Development Site Indexed?
-
So, my company's site has been pretty tough to try to get moving in the right direction on Google's SERPs. I had believed that it was mainly due to having a shortage of back links and a horrible home page load time. Everything else seems to be set up pretty well.
I was messing around and used the site: Google search operator for our staging site. I found stage.site.com and a lot of our other staging pages in the search results. I have to think that this is the problem and causing a duplicate content penalty of the entire site.
I guess I now need to 301 redirect the entire site? Has anyone every had this issue before and have fixed it?
Thanks for any help.
-
Thank you both for your help!
-
Hello there,
What James said is correct, but that will not prevent to be indexed again.
There is no need to redirect 301 the other versions of the site, if they are not usefull to google and users, just tell google to deindex them. Be carefull not o set a robots.txt and make those site uncrawable, because GoogleBot will never re-crawl those pages and understand that you want to remove them from the index.
Use Meta robots tag: in every page you want to be deindexed.Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.
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
-
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Which is better /section/ or section/index.php?
I have noticed that Google has started to simply link to /section/ as opposed to /section/index.php and I haven't changed any canonical tags etc. I have looked at my pages moz authority for the two /section/ = 28/100
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes
/section/index.php = 42/100 How would I go about transferring the authority to /section/ from /section/index.php to hopefully help me in my organic serp positions etc. Any insight would be great 🐵0 -
Dev Site Out of SERP But Still Indexed
One of our dev sites get indexed (live site robots.txt was moved to it, that has been corrected) 2-3 weeks ago. I immediately added it to our Webmaster Tools and used the Remove URL tool to get the whole thing out of the SERPs. A site:devurl search in Google now returns no results, but checking Index Status in WMT shows 2,889 pages of it still indexed. How can I get all instances of it completely removed from Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Splash/Warning Pages at front of site
We are looking at working on a site that needs a warning for users visiting - This splash/warning page is the only just google sees this not performing well in search engine - The sites are Wordpress sites - Would we use script to force a full screen pop up? This would be needed on a visit but if the user leaves and returns to the site the warning would need to reappear. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Automotive part / OEM / Manufacturer numbers
Hi All, What's the best way to optimise pages for OE / Manufacturer Part numbers? Disclaimer: All part numbers in this post are fictional. I dont want this post out ranking my client for real part numbers 🙂 Take this for Throttle Body for example: WOODYS S-AB-Q.123.53G This is the main part number from WOODYS (the manufacturer). However, these are all variations of exactly the same product: Woodys 2.78972.11.0 Woodys 2.78972.16.0 Woodys 2.78972.20.0 Woodys 2.78972.26.0 Oh, and car brands use OE numbers for these parts, such as: VWA 9808e40923G VWA 9808e40923L VWA 9808e40923M VWA 9808e40923P VWA 9808e40923Q These internal part numbers are vitally important as most of my clients customers are garages/mechanics so they're very likely to search on OE numbers. So, would you suggest: Optimising 10 different pages for the same product (using the part numbers in the URL, Title and H1). The problem is there's no unique content for these pages, only the part number varies, so this would likely get penalised for dupe content, or not enough unique content. Optimising one page for all terms. If so, how do you suggest doing this to ensure all part/OE numbers rank well and part numbers are prominent in the SERPS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowoody
Could Schema.org help here by marking up these EO numbers with the isSimilarTo property of the Product type? I'm trying to ensure these part number get equal presence in the SERP snippet when searched for, even though I can't physically include all these numbers in the Title tag, URL and H1 of one page. 3. Something else? Thanks, Woody 🙂1 -
Site Search Results in Index -- Help
Hi, I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index. (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.) Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed. I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links. But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be: Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?) Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs? Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good? Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability. Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice. Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IOSC1 -
Is there any importance in including http:// in the url?
I have seen some sites that always redirect to https and some sites that always redirect to http://, but lately I have seen sites that force the url to just the site. As in [sitename].com, no www. no http://. Does this affect SEO in anyway? Is it good or bad for other things? I was surprised when I saw it and don't really know what effect it has.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Indexed non existent pages, problem appeared after we 301d the url/index to the url.
I recently read that if a site has 2 pages that are live such as: http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/ will come up as duplicate if they are both live... I read that it's best to 301 redirect the http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. I read that this helps avoid duplicate content and keep all the link juice on one page. We did the 301 for one of our clients and we got about 20,000 errors that did not exist. The errors are of pages that are indexed but do not exist on the server. We are assuming that these indexed (nonexistent) pages are somehow linked to the http://www.url.com/index The links are showing 200 OK. We took off the 301 redirect from the http://www.url.com/index page however now we still have 2 exaact pages, www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. What is the best way to solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0