Development site accidentally got indexed and now appears in SERPs. How to fix?
-
I work at a design firm, and we just redesigned a website for a client. When it came time for the coding, we initially built a development site to work out all the kinks before going live. Then we relaunched the actual site about a week ago.
Here's the problem: Somehow, the developer who coded the site for us (a freelancer) allowed the development site to be indexed by Google.
Now, when you enter the client's name into Google, the development site appears higher in the results pages than the real site! In fact, the real site isn't even in the top 50 search results. The client is understandably angry about this for multiple reasons.
We quickly added a robots.txt file to the development site and a 301 redirect to the real site. However, that did seemed to have no effect on the problem.
Any ideas on how to fix this mess? Thank you in advance!
-
For the future, I'd suggest using something like Code Monitor (https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php) to monitor for any changes to your live or staging robots.txt. I've been in situations where too many people had access to the site that didn't know what they were doing, and getting an alert within 24 hours that someone changed something in robots.txt really saved us.
-
This exact same thing happened to me. I wasn't aware of the remove URL tool that others have suggested, so if it helps I'll tell you what I did. I simply added a rel=canonical tag from the development site to the new one. Then, once the new one had regained its SERP I deleted the development site. That way, I was sure that the client's site would have good positions.
-
Both nailed it spot on. Thats the way to go.
-
Use Google Webmaster tools. Under Site Configuration > Crawler Access, there is a "Remove URL" tab that will allow you to request URLs be removed from Google's index.
-
Hi Matt
Through Google Webmaster Tools, you can request that the whole website (the development site) be removed from Google's index. Could speed up the removal process by doing so.
Regards
Simon
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
-
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Seo For Forum Sites
I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?
Technical SEO | | tutarmi0 -
Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)
Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Problem indexing web developed with Ruby on Rails
Hi there! Here we are again, we are having problems indexing one of our clients, which website has been developed with Ruby on Rails. It doesnt get the titles right from almost all our pages...Has anyone had the same problem? Any feedback would help a lot... Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Comunicare0 -
Best practice for eCommerce site migration, should I 301 redirect or match URLs on new site
Hi Guys, I have been struggling with this one for quite some time. I am no SEO expert like many of you, rather just a small business owner trying to do the right thing, so forgive me if I say something that makes no sense 🙂 I am moving our eCommerce store from one platform to another, in the process the store is getting a massive face lift. The part I am struggling with is whether I should keep my existing URL structure in place or use 301 redirects to create a cleaner looking URLs. Currently the URLs are a little long and I would love to move to a /category/product_name type format. Of course the goal is not to lose ranking in the process, I rank pretty well for several competitive phrases and do not want to create a negative impact. How would you guys handle this? Thanks, Dinesh
Technical SEO | | MyFairyTaleBooks0 -
My site was hammered by this last update -- I'm freaking out -- what now
I looked at my seomoz report yesterday, almost all my money keywords went to hell. When I was looking at the graph for one of my keywords it looked so depressing I don't think I can look at it again. The funny thing is that my competitors have bunch of low quality links on unrelated websites and they haven't been touched. How to approach this problem, I'm scared to do anything at this point.
Technical SEO | | Tolod0 -
Partial Site Move -- Tell Google Entire Site Moved?
OK this one's a little confusing, please try to follow along. We recently went through a rebranding where we brought a new domain online for one of our brands (we'll call this domain 'B' -- it's also not the site linked to in my profile, not to confuse things). This brand accounted for 90% of the pages and 90% of the e-comm on the existing domain (we'll call the existing domain 'A') . 'A' was also redesigned and it's URL structure has changed. We have 301s in place on A that redirect to B for those 90% of pages and we also have internal 301s on A for the remaining 10% of pages whose URL has changed as a result of the A redesign What I'm wondering is if I should tell Google through webmaster tools that 'A' is now 'B' through the 'Change of Address' form. If I do this, will the existing products that remain on A suffer? I suppose I could just 301 the 10% of URLs on B back to A but I'm wondering if Google would see that as a loop since I just got done telling it that A is now B. I realize there probably isn't a perfect answer here but I'm looking for the "least worst" solution. I also realize that it's not optimal that we moved 90% of the pages from A to B, but it's the situation we're in.
Technical SEO | | badgerdigital0