SEO hosting 101 – don't leak your staging urls into Google!
Your web design company has sold you an “advanced” SEO deal with your brand new website and hosting package and everything looks perfect. The site architecture, url handling, migration redirects and everything else SEO is apparently perfect. You go live, safe in the knowledge of a job well done. Months later, nothing. You ranked better before the new site went live!
What went wrong? Sometimes duplicate content problems are not at all easy to find and here’s a classic example. A group of recruitment websites leaking their staging server urls into Google’s, Yahoo’s and Live’s index. In live’s case, the problem is quite severe with more than 6000 indexed urls at the staging site hosting.hotlizard.co.uk.
