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How to stop staging site from being indexed and listed	


  How to Stop a Staging Site From Being Listed in Google

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Marvin Russell 


      Marvin Russell 

Founded MySiteAuditor • Former Agency Owner • Let's connect on Twitter


Marvin Russell 


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Ever have this problem? Your staging site accidentally gets listed in
Google’s search results. This is very bad for many reasons. The first
reason is the fear of being penalized for duplicate content once the
production site goes live. Second, it’s really embarrassing when the
client Googles themselves and sees the staging site in the results.
Generally, the staging server should only be viewed by the developers
and the client. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen because the
staging site wasn’t properly blocking Google, resulting in the site
being listed in Google.


    Indexed vs Listed

This is the first common mistake. *Many people think blocking Google
from indexing your site means you won’t be listed in their search
results.* So, they end up using robots.txt to block Google from indexing
the staging site. That is very wrong. Here’s why:

*Being indexed means that your site or web pages have been downloaded
and added to a server.* That’s all. *Being listed means that Google is
displaying a link to your site or page in their search results.* So,
blocking Google from indexing your site doesn’t mean they still won’t
list your site in their search results. It just means they won’t keep a
copy of it on their server.

Here’s how to stop Google from listing and indexing your staging site.


    Step 1: robots.txt

You still want to try and block Google from indexing your site. It does
help. But it’s not the answer; hence, step two.  If you don’t know how
to stop Google from indexing your site in robots.txt, just add this to a
robots.txt file, and place it in the root folder of your website.

In the robots.txt file simply add these two lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /


    Step 2: .htaccess login

The second step and *the most effective way to stop your staging site
from being listed in Google’s search results is to require a username
and password to enter the site using .htaccess.* This will stop Google
from accessing and listing your staging site in their search
results. Learn more from Google


Create a .htaccess login is fairly simple. In fact, there are a few free
tools that will do it for you:
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/password/

http://www.htaccesstools.com/htaccess-authentication/



      Conclusion

That’s all there is to it. If you follow both steps you won’t get listed
in Google’s search results. Both steps shouldn’t take you more than 5
minutes to complete. Oh, be sure to remember one more important thing:
don’t forget to give your client the username and password to the
staging site.

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