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
-
Site migration/ CMS/domain site structure change-no access to search console
Hi everyone, We are migrating an old site under a bigger umbrella (our main domain). As mentioned in the title, We'll perform CMS migration, domain change, and site structure change. Now, the major problem is that we can't get into google search console for the old site. The site still has old GA code, so google search console verification using this method is not possible, also there is no way developers will be able to add GTM or edit DNS setting (not to bother you with the reason why). Now, my dilemma is : 1. Do we need access to old search console to notify Google about the domain name change or this could be done from our main site (old site will become a part of) search console 2. We are setting up 301 redirects from old to the new domain (not perfect 1:1 redirect ). Once migration is done does anything else needs to be done with the old domain (it will become obsolete)? 3.The main site, Site-map... Should I create a new sitemap with newly added pages or update the current one. 4. if you have anything else please add:) Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin0 -
Is there an issue with my site?
Been mostly hanging around top of page two for the last couple of years for “Liverpool Wedding photographer” although got myself on page 1 for “Liverpool photographer” I have split the title of the page to target these two keywords. I took the Liverpool photographer off the title to see if it was being detrimental to the “Liverpool wedding photographer” I didn’t see no increase in ranking so put it back as I get a bit of commercial work from it. Since last year I have got onto page 1 at least three times around position 5-6. Within a week or two I start sliding down again and end up back at top of page two. I could understand this slow push out if my competitors were busy SEO wise but from what I have seen they are not. There is a guy using the keywords in URL and calls himself “Liverpool wedding photographer” last time I checked he literally had no links but is in the first 5 positions. I have I think a better link profile than every one else. Although I am on and off with Facebook and Instagram, (more off) so that probably isn’t helping. Although I have a colleague in the video side of things and he doesn’t use social media at all and it hasn’t harmed him. A few years ago I was burned quite badly by a total charlatan. He sunk my home page to page 4. He talked the talk about creating landing pages but his methods were shoddy to say the least. I can’t believe I was taken in by him, although I was only with him for 2 months. He was still using spammy link techniques to generate lots of toxic links for me! I disavowed all of his links and put the keywords back on the home page and was back to my usual top of page 2 position within a week. Since then I have disavowed all directory links and anything not wedding related. I have an article which ranks 1st or second for “Nikon CLS”. I have also another article of 2000 words or so on another reasonable placed photography website. A few links from other vendors or people I have taken photographs for. I have about 10 featured weddings with a link on 4 good weddings blogs. I don’t think a massive amount of blog comments although I have stopped doing this. If I look at most of the competitors these are their main links, with directories as well! Last winter I put a quite substantial article about documentary wedding photography on my home page. I flew to number 2, although I photographed The World Transformed (the alternative labour conference in Liverpool). I got a lot of clicks to a gallery page (few thousand off social media} so I don’t know if that coincided with it. Same thing – watching the website go down a few positions every day until within just over a week or two I was about 4<sup>th</sup> on page 2! Its like my website is on a spring which can push into page 1 but rebounds back to top of page 2. I am staring to worry that my site has been marked as a bad character in some way because I get what seems to be rough treatment from google compared to my peers. I have written I think 4 or 5 (1500 word) articles the last couple of months talking about lenses and wedding photography related topics and Google pushed me back to page 1, peaking At position 5. I was there for a few weeks and then the slide happened again. Bit demoralised at the moment, what to do? Any help or pointers would be most appreciated. Best wishes. David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Canonical or No-index
Just a quick question really. Say I have a Promotions page where I list all current promotions for a product, and update it regularly to reflect the latest offer codes etc. On top of that I have Offer announcement posts for specific promotions for that product, highlighting very briefly the promotion, but also linking back to the main product promotion page which has a the promotion duplicated. So main page is 1000+ words with half a dozen promotions, the small post might be 200 words, and quickly become irrelevant as it is a limited time news article. Now, I don't want the promotion page indexed (unless it has a larger news story attached to the promotion, but for this purpose presume it is doesn't). Initially the core essence of the post will be duplicated in the main Promotion page, but later as the offer expires it wouldn't be. Therefore would you Rel Canonical or just simply No-index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheWebMastercom0 -
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making : ![Red ford truck](2554.jpg) changed to ![Red ford truck](6842.jpg)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
How to take out international URL from google US index/hreflang help
Hi Moz Community, Weird/confusing question so I'll try my best. The company I work for also has an Australian retail website. When you do a site:ourbrand.com search the second result that pops up is au.brand.com, which redirects to the actual brand.com.au website. The Australian site owner removed this redirect per my bosses request and now it leads to a an unavailable webpage. I'm confused as to best approach, is there a way to noindex the au.brand.com URL from US based searches? My only problem is that the au.brand.com URL is ranking higher than all of the actual US based sub-cat pages when using a site search. Is this an appropriate place for an hreflang tag? Let me know how I can help clarify the issue. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
Domaim.com/jobs?location=10 is indexed, so is domain.com/jobs/sheffield
Whats the best way you'd tackle that problem? I'm inheriting a website and the old devs had multiple internal links pointing to domain.com/jobs?location=10 (plus a ton of other numbers assigned to locations) and so they've been indexed. I usually use WMTs parameter tool but I'm not sure what the best approach would be other than that. Any help would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Indexing falling/search queries the same - concerned
Hello, I posted abou this a few days ago but didn't really get anywhere and now have new information after looking into it more. This is my site - http://www.whosjack.org My page indexing has been falling steadily daily currently from thousands of pages indexed to just a couple of hundred. My search queries don't seem to be currently affected, I have done crawl tests to see if the site can be crawled and put the site:whosjack.org into Google and had 12,000 results come back when goole has said it has indexed 133 and falling. However all pages indexed on the site:whosjack.org search seem to be stories with just two words in the title? I am sure I am missing out on traffic here but can't work out what the issue is and how to fix it. I have no alerts on my dashboard and when I submit sitemaps to webmaster tools I get 15,115 URLs submitted 12,088 URLs indexedwhich cant be bad?Any help/suggestions really appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luwhosjack0 -
Moving from a static HTML CSS site with .html files to a Wordpress Site while keeping link structure
Mozzers, Hope this finds you well. I need some advice. We have a site built with a dreamweaver template, and it is lacking in responsiveness, ease of updates, and a lot of the coding is behind traditional web standards (which I know will start to hurt our rank - if not the user experience). For SEO purposes, we would like to move the existing static based site to Wordpress so we can update it easily and keep content fresh. Our current site, thriveboston.com, has a lot of page extensions ending in .html. For the transition, it is extremely important for us to keep the link structure. We rank well in the SERPs for Boston Counseling, etc... I found and tested a plugin (offline) that can add a .html extension to Wordpress pages, which allows us to keep our current structure, but has anyone had any luck with this live? Has anyone had any luck moving from a static site - to a Wordpress site - while keeping the current link structure - without hurting any rank? We hope to move soon because if the site continues to grow, it will become even harder to migrate the site over. Also, does anyone have any hesitations? It this a bad move? Should we just stay on the current DWT template (the HTML and CSS) and not migrate? Any suggestions and advice will be heeded. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _Thriveworks0