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.
How preproduction website is getting indexed in Google.
-
Hi team,
Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are getting indexed in Google.
-
As Eric hinted, the best method to prevent any pages being indexed would be to use htaccess password protection dialog on your development site. It's fairly easy to implement. You can find instructions to do so here: http://www.htaccesstools.com/articles/password-protection/
-
Hi Anoop! Have everyone's answers helped? Do you still have any questions?
-
Anoop, when a 'development' or 'preproduction' website or subdomain is getting indexed, that means that you haven't stopped the search engines from crawling it. The search engines, especially Google, are very aggressive at crawling, and they will crawl just about any URL that they find. It seems as though all you have to do is visit that page and it's going to get crawled.
Best way to stop Google from crawling (then indexing) a website is to stop it from getting crawled using the robots.txt file. Keep in mind, though, that even if you tell them to stay out of it using the robots.txt file they will still index those URLs.
The only way to stop Google from crawling would be to password protect the website or make it available only on a private server, or available via VPN only.
-
In addition to noindexing the pages using the meta tag, if you have WMT / Search Console set up, you can request Google remove those URLs from their index for the time being. I've found that this may take up to a couple of hours from the removal request to the time of actual removal.
As to how they were found, there's a good chance that Google crawled a link to a preproduction webpage and went from there.
-
Hi
To prevent most search engine web crawlers from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the section of your page:
To prevent only Google web crawlers from indexing a page:
You should be aware that some search engine web crawlers might interpret the
noindexdirective differently. As a result, it is possible that your page might still appear in results from other search engines.here is complete guide: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag?csw=1
-
Hi,
Have you noindexed & nofollowed the site and pages? I would also suggest you block all crawlers by disallowing access in the robots.txt file.
Do you know if this has all been done?
-Andy
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
-
Why images are not getting indexed and showing in Google webmaster
Hi, I would like to ask why our website images not indexing in Google. I have shared the following screenshot of the search console. https://www.screencast.com/t/yKoCBT6Q8Upw Last week (Friday 14 Sept 2018) it was showing 23.5K out 31K were submitted and indexed by Google. But now, it is showing only 1K 😞 Can you please let me know why might this happen, why images are not getting indexed and showing in Google webmaster.
Technical SEO | | 21centuryweb0 -
Desktop & Mobile XML Sitemap Submitted But Only Desktop Sitemap Indexed On Google Search Console
Hi! The Problem We have submitted to GSC a sitemap index. Within that index there are 4 XML Sitemaps. Including one for the desktop site and one for the mobile site. The desktop sitemap has 3300 URLs, of which Google has indexed (according to GSC) 3,000 (approx). The mobile sitemap has 1,000 URLs of which Google has indexed 74 of them. The pages are crawlable, the site structure is logical. And performing a Landing Page URL search (showing only Google/Organic source/medium) on Google Analytics I can see that hundreds of those mobile URLs are being landed on. A search on mobile for a longtail keyword from a (randomly selected) page shows a result in the SERPs for the mobile page that judging by GSC has not been indexed. Could this be because we have recently added rel=alternate tags on our desktop pages (and of course corresponding canonical ones on mobile). Would Google then 'not index' rel=alternate page versions? Thanks for any input on this one. PmHmG
Technical SEO | | AlisonMills0 -
Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS - How long does it take Google to re-index the site?
hello Moz We know that this year, Moz changed its domain to moz.rainyclouds.online from www.seomoz.org
Technical SEO | | joony
however, when you type "site:seomoz.org" you still can find old urls indexed on Google (on page 7 and above) We also changed our site from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
And Google is indexing both sites even though we did proper 301 redirection via htaccess. How long would it take Google to refresh the index? We just don't worry about it? Say we redirected our entire site. What is going to happen to those websites that copied and pasted our content? We have already DMCAed their webpages, but making our site https would mean that their website is now more original than our site? Thus, Google assumes that we have copied their site? (Google is very slow on responding to our DMCA complaint) Thank you in advance for your reply.0 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
How do I get out of google bomb?
Hi all, I have a website named bijouxroom.com; and I was in the 7th page for the search term takı in google; and 2nd page for online takı. Now, I see that in one day my results seem to be on the 13th and 10th page in google respectively. I made too much anchor text for takı and online takı. What shall I do to gain my positions back? Thanks in advance. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ozererim0 -
Getting a video displaying a lightbox indexed
We have created a video for a category page with the goal of building links to the page and improving the conversion rate of visitors to the page. This category is Christmas oriented so we want to get the video dropped in ASAP. Unfortunately there was a mixup with our developer and he created a lightbox pop-up to display the video on the category page. I'm concerned this will hurt our ability to get the video indexed in Google. Here was his response. Is what he says here true? "With the video originally being in lightbox the iFrame Embed was enough since the video can't be on the page, it would have to be hidden on the page which is ignored by Google. The SEO would be derived from modifying the video sitemap to define the category page as the HTML page for the Wistia video and Google will make the association. The sitemap did all the heavy lifting, the schema markup did not come till later so it had no additional affect on Google other then to re-enforce the sitemap." Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | GManSEO0 -
Google is indexing my directories
I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was looking at all of Google's results for my site and I found dozens of results for directories such as: Index of /scouting/blog/wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins Obviously I don't want those indexed. How do I prevent Google from indexing those? Also, it only seems to be doing it with Wordpress, not any of the directories on my main site. (We have a wordpress blog, which is only a portion of the site)
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Struggling to get my lyrics website fully indexed
Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research! My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website. Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now. My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed. I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed! I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google. Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!
Technical SEO | | SEOed0