Development site accidentally got indexed and now appears in SERPs. How to fix?
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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!
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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.
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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.
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Both nailed it spot on. Thats the way to go.
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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.
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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
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