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Development Site Ranking Instead Of Live
Hi Guys, A client of mine has had a new site build of which they had it live on a development URL. That URL is now dead but currently ranking while the live one does not. Have submitted it to the search console and just waiting now. Haven’t had this happen before just wondering if anyone else has experienced the same.
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3 Replies
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Remove that development url from google using search console.
Go to removal section under ‘Index’ in the console, submit that page for removing from google.
Hope, you add the original url in the sitemap xml file.
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Interesting. I’ve never had that happen to me but a few ideas to try. My gut feel is that Google thinks there is duplicate content so it’s only showing the one site.
1. If you haven’t, use canonical tags on the LIVE site
2. I’d consider getting the DEV site back up (at least just the homepage) and implementing “noindex, nofollow” both in the HTML and the robot.txt (assuming apache server).
3. Do what manojpmp is suggesting.
4. Wait (I know frustrating)Let us know how it goes.
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…and that’s why dev sites should be no index and password protected
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