I'm about to issue these instructions would appreciate it if you could quickly confirm covers your advice correctly and nothing missing:

1) Setup a completely different GWT account unrelated to the main site, so that there is a new GWT account specific to the staging subdomain
2) Add a robots.txt on the staging area subdomain site that disallows all pages and all crawlers OR use the noindex meta tag on all pages.  Its obviously very important when you update the main site it DOES NOTinclude or push out these files too (since that would result in main site or pages being de-indexed)3) Request removal of all pages in GWT.  Leave the form blank for the page to be removed since this will remove the entire site4) After about 1 month (or you see that the pages are all out of the serps), and google has spidered and seen the robots.txt, then put up a password on the entire staging site.Note:For brand new sites staging areas that don't yet exist or exist but are new and not yet showing up in the index then simply add a password for human access to prevent the above process being required in the future.

Thanks for clarifying that CleverPHD & thanks again for all your help and great advice

Have a great weekend !!

All Best

Dan

thanks !

as er my last question theres no risk of accidentally taking out the main site as part of this process ?

cheers

dan

Thanks so much for that great advice

just a bit worried about accidentally getting main site removed by accident, i take it so long as its a brand new GWT account for that specific subdomain then this cant happen ?

Cheers

Dan

Thanks Anthony,

The staging area already exists and is indexable as far as i can tell

So i need to tell developers to  exclude crawling via robots.txt, add a no-index tag to head of each page but keep it followed so still crawlable i.e. within the Head section of every page on the dev area

OR alternatively just remove urls from GWT)

If excluding crawling via robots.txt file then why do you need to add a noindex tag to each page too, surely the robots.txt deals with this situation ?

cheers

dan

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