Comments on: SEO hosting 101 – don’t leak your staging urls into Google!

By: SEO Consultant Joel

SEO Consultant Joel — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:10:18 +0000

Great post. I have seen this happen many times. Duplicate content is a big no no in the Goog’s Guidelines. Also you want to be careful if you have a lot of good links to URL’s and then change the URL. Eeeekkk!

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:26:02 +0000

Hi Richard, great post, good to see you have a blog these days, I will keep an eye out for new posts!

That is unfortunate for Hot Lizard that you found those Dev URLs… It makes them look quite bad, especially as they offer an SEO service on those recruitment sites of theirs!

By: veronica

veronica — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:12:12 +0000

http://forums.megagames.com/forums/member.php?u=210126 veronica zemanova

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:00:04 +0000

Hi Denis, that’s a great link thatnks very much for your feedback!

By: denis elbert

denis elbert — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:41:30 +0000

I recently got stuck with problem on an ASP.Net server. It drove me nuts until I found an article on how to 301 redirect staging server HTTP requests -

http://www.demonzmedia.com/DemonzBlog/?p=13

That fixed the problem.

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:30:53 +0000

Hi Radoo - you're right about that. I noticed not long ago that a very influential person in the seo community had exactly that problem not long ago!

By: radoo

radoo — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:57:49 +0000

Great article! Very useful.
Some sites also have problems with the canonical links (with / and without it at the end). This one should be checked also when migrating from a known hosting to an unpredictable one

By: g1smd

g1smd — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 10:55:50 +0000

I also like to redirect using .htaccess as that fixes the URL to the right domain should anyone copy the URL from their browser, and paste it into the content of some other site as a link.

However, I always have the PHP option installed too. This acts as a backup in case the .htaccess file goes AWOL on a server move or somesuch. More likely, it helps if there is a URL combination that can access the site, but it is a combination that I am not aware of (usual things are bare IP address, wild-card sub-domains off the main domain, and both sub-domains and folders off the hosting company domain name), as it is easy to miss one if someone else has set the server up.

By: Jim Gaudet

Jim Gaudet — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:30:10 +0000

Good info, thanks.
g1smd – that is a good idea with the PHP code. I believe I will start implementing that into my websites.

~ Jim

By: AK Works

AK Works — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:10:23 +0000

Great post. Not enough people know or think about this issues; SEOs, web designers alike – all seem to forget about this issue.

I worked for a real estate website company one time. I was doing SEO for the clients and found out later that their DEV servers were completely indexed by the search engines. They had dupes of all of their clients. It was pretty shameful.

By: Michael Tighe

Michael Tighe — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:47:06 +0000

This is a great post! Thank you for sharing, I could see it being a real issue.

By: g1smd

g1smd — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:42:45 +0000

I often modify the PHP so that if the wrong domain is called the PHP adds the noindex tag to the page.

I then don’t have to remember to add or remove anything further.