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.
SEO audit on a beta site
-
HI there, Is there much point conducting an SEO site audit on a site that has not yet launched and is protected behind a login? Presumably none of the usual SEO tools (Moz, Screaming Frog etc) can crawl this site becuase it is all locked behind a login. Would it be better to launch it and then do a site audit?
Thanks
-
Not sure if not yet lunched meaning it is a brand new site and domain or if this is going to be a new edsign/cms etc..
so, If the site never went live you should have no concerns google spider coming to crawl your site.
But if it is an updated version of an existing website, its better to create a subdomain.
This is the most common practice, you create something like test.domain.com and use robots.txt on this test domain to block all access.it is the safest way that i know
good luck
-
It isn't possible to do this when behind a login but I would definitely still spend the time doing what you can manually before pushing it live.
The other option you have is to push it "live" but block the whole site from crawlers with Robots.txt. Screaming Frog does give you the option to ignore the instructions in Robots so you could still crawl it. If this site is replacing an existing one that makes it a little more tricky. If that's the case, you could still do this but make sure that you get to work on your audit the second you push it live and get it done as quickly as possible.
If the site is up and blocked via Robots for 20 minutes it's unlikely to cause an issue. If you leave it that way for a week however... not such a good idea
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
-
Reducing number of site pages?
Hi, I am looking through my site structure and I have a lot of pages left over from the days of article keywords. Probably 7 or 8 years ago, someone sold my husband on article key word pages. I have slowly gotten rid of a lot of them as they have fallen out out of the ranks. I would like to get rid of the rest, probably 5 or 6 pages. Will it hurt my rankings to delete pages and redirect them? My customers really like the simplicity of our site and I want to keep it that way, plus clean up flags that Moz is telling me is a problem. I think its easier to keep less pages top notch than have to worry with a lot of them. Especially since my customers aren't viewing them. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Tags - Good or bad for SEO
We are getting Moz errors for duplicate content because tag pages share the same blog posts. Is there any way to fix this? Are these errors bad for SEO, or can I simply disregard these and ignore them? We are also getting Moz errors for missing descriptions on tag pages. I am unsure how to fix these errors, as we do not actually have pages for these on our WordPress site where we are able to put in a description. I have heard that having tags can be good for SEO? (We don't mind having several links that show up when searching for us on google...) As far as the SEO goes, I am not sure what to do. Does anyone know the best strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | Christinaa0 -
Include Site Name in Page Titles or not
i would like to ask if it is a good practice or not to Include Site Name in Page Titles. My page is not selling products it is about plagiarism checker tool. i will give one example in one page we are writing about the plagiarism types so the page title is plagiarism types and then is the site name. what is the better practice? Keep it or not? thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | anavasis3 -
Phone number for SEO
We have had an interesting question from a client. They have asked if removing their phone number from their website would have an affect on their rankings. Our immediate answer was 'No' but it may affect the Brand, Usability and Customer experience by restricting the methods of contact. This then made us think that perhaps then it could have an effect in the long term. This situation is also complicated by the fact that they do not have a Google Local Plus account for operational, sensitivity reasons (they don't want to openly publicise their address) We believe that there shouldn't be any negative affect but thought we would open a discussion. Thanks in advance for any comments/ideas.
On-Page Optimization | | vital_hike0 -
Does Bolding Text Have Any Impact on SEO?
Someone told me it does but I thought that was old school way of thinking. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | tryfantasy1 -
SEO for Online Auto Parts Store
I'm currently doing an audit for an online auto parts store and am having a hard time wrapping my head around their duplicate content issue. The current set up is this: The catalogue starts with the user selecting their year of vehicle They then choose their brand (so each of the year pages have listed every single brand of car, creating duplicate content) They then choose their model of car and then the engine And then this takes them to a page listing every type/category of product they sell (so each and every model type/engine size has the exact same content!) This is amounting to literally thousands of pages being seen as duplicates It's a giant mess. Is using rel=canonical the best thing to do? I'm having a hard time seeing a logical way of structuring the site to avoid this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Does css float affect SEO?
It is generally believed that the closer the content is to the top of the page, the better it is for SEO. If that's incorrect, please let me know. I have a 2 column site where the left menu is navigation and right side is content. Obviously, the left menu appears in the code before the content does, but I can flip them around via css float. If I do that, the content will appear on the left visually, even though in the code it still comes after the left side navigation. Do either positions affect seo?
On-Page Optimization | | cmp1010 -
SEO Optimizing in UMBRACO
Hi there, I am planning to use UMBRACO to manage my existing website, so my question to Seomozzers out there is what should I be aware of, how safe is it to have UMBRACO in terms of SEO. By using this software, would it be possible to get a positive or negative impact on my keyword rankings? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | matti_wilson0