That would be a good way to do it. The other way would be to block it in the robots.txt file on the root directory. Although be careful you aren't blocking both since it's a subdomain.

You could also add a noindex, nofollow tag to each dev page but then you have to remember to remove those when you push them live to your real domain.

I'd probably go with the Robots.txt option since using the redirect will not allow you to view the site live which I'm assuming would take away from the whole point of having this "staging" sub-domain.

Hi again Peter,

That is very interesting and I see your confusion here. I repeated the same test and was given the same results without your brand name in query.. Still when Google is listing the title they are listing your brand name.

It seems to me that they really want your brand name to show in this title. Why? I'm not entirely sure. But that's what they're adding to your title here..

Try shortening your title on that page by a word or two and adding a pipe (|) and "Mobify." Make that your test page for this issue and see what Google does with it when the change populates. I have a funny feeling it might pull your full title at that point.

Most sites out there try to drag their domain/brand into each page title anyway. You can call it "best practice" or just a "funny habit" but I feel like this is what Google is looking for with your site.

I'm incredibly curious, so if you don't mind trying this out and reporting back I would be greatly appreciative.

Thanks and good luck!

This was intriguing to me so I dug in a little and I have an initial theory here:

In the example you provided you seem to be searching with your brand name only. "Mobify" is bolded telling me that was a searched keyword.

The title tag for the page in question reads: "25 Top Design Upgrades to Make Your Mobile Revenue Skyrocket [SlideShare]"

My bet is that because you do not have the brand name in your title tag, Google is looking to display something that does carry this particular keyword. In this case it is looking for something with the word "Mobify" in it and finding it in the URL. If you take out the SlideShare portion of your title and replace it with "| Mobify" my guess is this problem will go away.

Look at the other URLs you are having this problem with and tell me if the brand name is missing from it but present in the searched query.

Let me know if this works!