Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index
-
I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains!
I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google:
Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index?
We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it?
I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all.
The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually.
Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?
-
Why couldn't I just put a password on the staging site, and let Google sort out the rest? Just playing devil's advocate.
-
If you've enough time to verify each subdomain in WMT and also removing 400+ domains one by one, then you can go for solution 2. You can't remove subdomain from verified WMT account of main domain, that's why you need to verify each domain.
Adding canonical is a better option, it wouldn't remove all of the demo domains from Google's index rapidly, you have to wait for few months, but you'll be on the safe side.
-
Out of curiosity, why wouldn't you recommend solution 2?
You mentioned that you faced a similar kind of situation in the past, how did that work out? Which of the 3 solutions (or all) did you opt for?
-
Good advice but an IP restriction for the demo sites won't be possible on this occasion as our router throws out a range of different IP addresses and we occasionally need the sites to be viewed externally! Any other suggestions to help?
-
I'd also recommend putting in an IP restriction for any of the demo sites.
So that if anyone visits the demo sites from a non-whitelisted IP address, then you can display an error message, or simply redirect them over to the live site.
That will likely have the search results quickly removed from the search engine.
Hope this helps!
-- Jeff
-
Solution 1:
Add robots.txt on all demo domains and block them, or add noindex in their header.
Solution 2: Verify each domain in webmaster tools and remove it entirely from the link removal section ( I wouldn't recommend this).
Solution 3:
If your both domains like agency1.domain.com and demo.agency1.domain.com have same coding and are clone then you should just add canonical url to the agency1.domain.com and canonical will be http://agency.domain.com/ it will work if it will be automatically shown in the demo domain. if it doesn't show up in the demo domain automatically then add the same canonical to the demo domain.
It will take some time to deindexed from serps, but it will surely work. I've faced the same kind of situation in past.
-
Noindex is your best option, really. It might take weeks, but I don't think any other method is going to be faster. Plus, technically speaking, "noindex" is the proper method for what you want to do - canonical tags or a robots.txt may do the job, but they aren't exactly the right way.
Good luck!
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
-
Website structure - best tools to analyse and plan, visually
Hi - I am about to analyse and then re-plan the structure of a website and think it would be best to do it graphically - in the form of a chart. Are there any tools you would recommend to visualise the structure of an existing website (perhaps something that can scan and then represent a websites) - or plan out a new/revised website? Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How to rank my website in Google UK?
Hi guys, I own a London based rubbish removal company, but don't have enough jobs. I know for sure that some of my competitors get most of their jobs trough Google searches. I also have a website, but don't receive calls from it at all. Can you please tell me how to rank my website on keywords like: "rubbish removal london", "waste clearance london", "junk collection london" and other similar keywords? I know that for person like me (without much experience in online marketing) will be difficult task to optimize the website, but at least - I need some advices from where to start. I'm also thinking to hire an SEO but not sure where to find a trusted company. Most importantly I have no idea how much should pay to expect good results? What is too much and what is too low? I will appreciate all advices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gorubbishgo0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alphonseha
The above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!?
Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.
0 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
What is the best way to get anchor text cloud in line?
So I am working on a website, and it has been doing seo with keyword links for a a few years. The first branded terms comes in a 7% in 10th in the list on Ahefs. The keyword terms are upwards of 14%. What is the best way to get this back in line? It would take several months to build keyword branded terms to make any difference - but it is doable. I could try link removal, but less than 10% seem to actually get removed -- which won't make a difference. The disavow file doesn't really seem to do anything either. What are your suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Best way to merge 2 ecommerce sites
Our Client owns two ecommerce websites. Website A sells 20 related brands. Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google. Website B was purchased from a competitor. It has 1 brand (also sold on site A). Search results are normally high on the first page of google. Client wants to consider merging the two sites. We are looking at options. Option 1: Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A. Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A Option 4: ??? Any thoughts on this would be great. We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EugeneF0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0