Why did Moz crawl our development site?
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In our Moz Pro account we have one campaign set up to track our main domain. This week Moz threw up around 400 new crawl errors, 99% of which were meta noindex issues.
What happened was that somehow Moz found the development/staging site and decided to crawl that. I have no idea how it was able to do this - the robots.txt is set to disallow all and there is password protection on the site. It looks like Moz ignored the robots.txt, but I still don't have any idea how it was able to do a crawl - it should have received a 401 Forbidden and not gone any further.
How do I a) clean this up without going through and manually ignoring each issue, and b) stop this from happening again?
Thanks!
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@multitimemachine a noindex tag only really applied to Bing/Google other crawlers etc.. You said you blocked (via wildcard) all robots, are you sure you've not gotten e.g. meta robots that might be different?
help@moz.com might be your best bet for a quick resolution for 'cleaning' the report though I'm still slightly lost as to how your main domain and dev/staging were confused as normally there is a subdomain in the way from my experience, even stranger as bots can't by-pass passwords unless it's your sitemap.xml?sorry I can't get you a direct response but without seeing the site or similar it's hard to diagnose though I'm sure the team at Moz can point you in the right direction .
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